IT is disconcerting when you watch an advert that feels as if it is aimed directly at you. It is even more unsettling when it’s an ad for Marks & Spencer.

But every time that M&S autumn menswear ad comes on I’m torn between horror that I’m so easily triggered by a cynical adman’s idea of what late middle-aged men who used to read the NME might like and the fact that I am actually quite taken with the M&S raincoat that turns up at one point in said ad.

If the goal is to grab the attention of ageing 1980s indie kids the M&S “Anything but Ordinary” campaign could hardly be better. Ceremony, New Order’s best song (well, it’s either that or Regret, or Bizarre Love Triangle, or Crystal, or Thieves Like Us, or …) as the soundtrack and a glimpse of the Salford Lads Club as a visual signifier of a time when loving The Smiths wasn’t quite so complicated as it is now.

Frankly, the only way it could have been tailored more for the 1980s version of me was if there was a Glenn Hoddle poster on the wall and some of the male models in the ad could be seen applying Ozone hole-threatening amounts of hairspray to their ridiculous hairstyle. (Elnett was my weapon of choice if I remember right).

As an aside, those male models in the ad are suspiciously young; I doubt any of them are old enough to have been hanging around in the Hacienda or Henry Afrikas back in the day. (Not that I did either. I spent the eighties in the long-demolished Grange student nightclub and the Barnton Bistro in Stirling. Also defunct. Stirling is possibly trying to tell me something.) There has been the odd bout of social media grumbling about New Order allowing M&S to use their song to sell jackets, but given that their best-known song Blue Monday has been used to sell everything from Sunkist to BT Plus that horse has surely long since bolted.

Maybe it’s the M&S association that is an issue for some. Those of us who are old enough to have marched against Thatcher/heard their parents ask if Boy George was a boy or a girl/remember when Michael Stipe had hair don’t shop at M&S surely?

Read more: Every so often, grief will remind you it hasn't finished with you

I suspect many of us do, even if it’s mostly at the M&S Food Hall. Even the cool kids want a bit of comfort as time goes by.

Cool. Such a 20th-century word, isn’t it? I don’t know what the 2023 equivalent is now? Sick? Whatever it is, I’m not that. I never really was, no matter how hard I tried.

Actually, what strikes me as most out of joint in the M&S ad is the notion that ordinary should be considered a pejorative these days. This is probably an age thing but ordinariness seems perfectly OK to me now. If you want to sit in and watch All Creatures Great and Small or Antiques Roadshow what’s wrong with that? If you like to shop in M&S crack on. Live your best life.

The truth is you don’t have to perform your difference. Difference, as John Hume once said, is the “essence of humanity.” In short it’s a bit more ingrained in us than our musical tastes.

And if anything, the currency of cool, if it still exists, is now claimed by all the worst people. All those “disruptors” who see themselves as special but who just extol attitudes - whether sexism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism - that seemed increasingly antediluvian back in the last century.

But now, they’re back baby, extolled by social media bros, influencers and third-rate politicians jonesing for the angry white male vote. With “friends” like these, the notion of cool has never been so uncool.

In the circumstances then the fact that I’m Googling “M&S Padded Mac” right now shouldn’t bother anyone. Least of all me.