The Post is pleased to introduce a new occasional series of musings from Rob Jones at All Plants North.

Rob and wife Charlotte run the small but beautifully formed plant shop and nursery All Plants North in nearby Cracoe, and live in Embsay. Rob has been writing for other village magazines for several years now but is new to The Embsay and Eastby Post. Rob used to write gardening advice but these soon became ramblings about everything else.

We hope you enjoy them.

It’s a funny thing, coolness.

My wife would have made a fortune as a travel agent. She recently persuaded me to go on holiday to Italy. Without her.

Instead, I was to go with the other significant woman in my life; my Mum. Didn’t even have a current passport when the idea was floated so she had to hotfoot it down to the Post Office and reapply. My Mum has always had a love of Italy and particularly wanted to go to a town called Lucca not far from Pisa, a few weeks later we have four nights booked in Tuscany. Think that’s weird? Read on.

On the night before we fly out, I have a brainwave for a magazine contribution around the concept of ‘coolness’.

When I was a kid I had a mate called Paddy. We were a couple of English kids in a huge Scottish comprehensive, so it was a small alliance against the local tribe. We both had to learn the lingo, words we had never heard before and get our ear in, wondering why they were always talking about someone called Ken. It was at a time when even the school system, and therefore the teachers too, seemed to be anti-dialect and our classmate (loose term) would get punished for using colloquial terms and words. At the same time, they would sing Flower of Scotland like they had just walked off the set of Braveheart.

Unlike me, Paddy was cool. He had a leather jacket and was an anarchist and into punk. I was into ELO and Eric Clapton because my Mum had one of his albums.

It’s a funny thing, coolness. I don’t think you can acquire it. You’re just born with it. If you try to acquire it, well, it’s just not cool.

Whilst Paddy was far more sophisticated than I, he was more of a poet than a rebel and it always seemed to be me that I ended up throwing my fists around when things came to a head with the anti-English contingent. I’m not proud to say it. It was just self-defence. My view is Paddy’s coolness got him out of a few scrapes before he moved back to England and abandoned me to my fate. Never really forgiven him.

Having had this thought, I then decide to look him up. Google him. See what the lad’s been up to in the intervening years. And before you know it. There he is. But now he has graduated to ‘suave cool’ and it turns out he has forged a successful career for himself in the movie industry in Hollywood. Home, according to Paddy’s profile, is L.A. 

And Lucca, Italy.

I nearly fell off my chair. How nuts is that?

So now I have to contact him. Because of course it would be plain rude, having made the weirdest of connections, not to. I find a couple of email addresses. Unlikely to hear anything, will probably get screened by a P.A. as nuisance mail. But the same day, no doubt having woken from under silk sheets in his L.A. mansion, he sends a reply. I can’t believe it. The internet does work! Tells me what he’s up to, not in Lucca, that would be too much, in New York apparently doing something flash. Great to hear from me etc., what am I up to??

Do I tell him I work out of a shed in Cracoe? Not quite, I dress it up a little but there’s only so much shine you can put on it. More messages keep coming, we discuss our lives to date. I’ll be honest, couldn’t help wondering to myself what if this is the break I need should Paddy ask me to do a screen test for his latest project – in the certain knowledge that I would bring a Roger Moore-esque eyebrow talent to the big screen. But of course, this doesn’t happen on the basis that it would guarantee to scare away my brand-new second-hand rekindled best (ok, only) Hollywood friend.

Perhaps it skipped a generation, but it turns out my son is cool. I wish that I had had his confidence when I was his age. He just has it. It’s innate and I’m jealous. Whereas I was speechless on the school stage at his age, he is getting up to sing. Solo.

Long may it continue – he’s a Paddy in the making.

Rob Jones