The Coldplay kiss cam saga? There's more!
A summary — for the non-existent group of people who don't yet know what I'm talking about. During a Coldplay concert in the Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts last Wednesday, a camera trained on the audience zoomed in on a particular couple: leaning against each other and swaying, caught up entirely in the music and the magic of the night and one another. Those images were then projected on to the vast screens that surround the stage. On realising they'd been caught in such candid intimacy, this couple did not (as tradition dictates) embrace the moment and one another, doubling down on their closeness and turning to kiss… But, rather, turned their backs and frenziedly ducked out of shot. 'Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy,' pronounced Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, one half of a historic 'conscious uncoupling' (from his former wife, Gwyneth Paltrow), from the stage.
Which do you think it was? A rhetorical question yet again, partly because we all know! He is Andy Byron, the married millionaire chief exec of the data company Astronomer (until Saturday anyway, when he resigned). She is Kristin Cabot, head of its human resources. Also married. But mainly because it was so incredibly obvious as it happened.
• Tech CEO resigns after Coldplay embrace with HR boss
So here we all are. Obsessing over it. Thinking and talking about little else. At best, at our most human, feeling a bit sorry for them — the exposure! — considerably sorrier yet for their respective wife and husband and their kids. But mainly revelling in it, because: this story has everything. Doesn't it? An incredibly neat, made-for-Netflix-type narrative — lives turn on a dime, in public (and Chris Martin's involved). It's got the kind of unnuanced black-and-white morality we can all support, because combing through the knotty braids of actual modern morality, wading our way through all that damn grey? That's such hard work, and always so inconclusive! Busted cheating in public, on the other hand, is not. We the multitudinous observers are now allowed to feel either a giddy, thrilling frisson of 'there but for the grace of God go I' or righteous fury, depending on our life choices.
And its got rich people, which means, even if we do feel ever-so-fleetingly sorry for Byron and Cabot, we can stop now. Serves them right — for the cheating, sure, but also for having more stuff than we do, and nicer hols.
It's got Coldplay, which adds something elusive but palpable, because Coldplay are so wholesome, so mainstream, so not affairy. Also because we all pretend we don't like Coldplay, yet we actually long to see them live (everyone says they're amazing live). It's got the work-fling angle, the classic trope that we'd feared modern dating and the apps and MeToo had eliminated, but apparently not; and last but by no means least, and in relation to that, it's got human resources! This is perhaps my personal favourite element of the story. Cabot, who is presumably charged with making sure things like this simply do not happen at Astronomer, not ever, who is part of a larger cultural movement intent on making Christmas parties less fun for all, is breaking every last rule she ever implemented, live, and in front of Chris Martin! Never mind those pressing questions newly raised regarding the legitimacy of her promotion to head of Astronomer's HR in November 2024, an appointment Byron himself heralded as rewarding 'Kristin's exceptional leadership and deep expertise in talent management'.
Which is inviting a joke too prurient for even me to make, so I shan't.
Are the alarms from stolen Lime bikes the sound of the summer? The Guardian thinks so — it has even named the beep, beep, beep they emit as they're ridden around by some tyke refusing to pay the initial £1 to unlock them, never mind the subsequent 27p a mile to ride, 'Hackney birdsong'. I am inclined to agree — though I take issue with the geographical specificity. I've been calling it the 'sound of Archway' for months now, because that's where I live, and that beep, beep, beep — often accompanied by an infernal clicking — reliably fills the air of my postcode, every late afternoon, around the time of school kick-out. And I suppose it'll only get worse and more sustained now that school has broken up. Oh dear. It's become the No 1 sensory assault of minor illegality round my way, more intrusive even than the lingering smell of weed (which I call 'Archway's signature scent' or 'Arome d'Archway'). To be fair, I find it and its perpetrators marginally less annoying than those middle-aged men on insanely overpriced bikes, clad in full Lycra, who suddenly seem oblivious to the notion the Highway Code might apply to them too, with specific reference to their never, ever stopping at pedestrian crossings. They can't! Because they've got a PB to improve upon, and they're saving the planet anyway, and also they're never going to die. Not them. Too fit. Far fitter than they were at 20. So they'll just speed on through, whoosh past any poor soul attempting to dash across a road, in those paltry designated seconds of paused traffic, because who cares about them?
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