One of the freedoms of later life, if you’re not Keith Richards, is that you no longer have to worry about being cool. Cool, far more than money, is the currency of youth, and as a teenager I knew who had it and who didn’t. But what was cool, all those decades ago? Who possessed it, and why did it matter?

Coolness, in my youth, seemed in the DNA, something you either had or didn’t

There were various things that defined ‘cool’ when I was a teenager, and most of us in some way fell short. It was the ability not to get too excited about things. To feel enthusiasms but show them obliquely. To wear clothes that hinted at certain trends but never to copy anyone else’s style too slavishly. To hang out with beautiful women but not develop crushes on each of them in turn. It was a knack for never having anything foolish happen to you or, if it did, for showing the style and wit to minimise it quickly and carry it off.

But beyond all these things, real cool was something indefinable, an ‘it’ quality, a charisma that showed itself early. Some just had it and from the age of about ten had probably been wowing onlookers. The rest of us watched from the sidelines and tried too hard to achieve it – the very definition of ‘uncool’.

Most boys at my boarding school aimed at a kind of street cred. They put on mockney accents, played in bands, had Aswad posters on their walls, were rude to the prefects and worked a lot in the art department on vaguely ethnic-looking daubs. Some spoke agonisingly slowly or sotto voce, to make demand for their thoughts well outstrip the supply. They were the kids often in trouble for smoking or answering........

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