A letter from a reader

At 68, my sister looked at my winter coat and asked if it was Brian's

This is the first time I have ever written anything meant for other women to read, and I will say before we go any further that I am not a writer, and I have never once thought it my place to tell anybody what she ought to wear.

But three different women asked me about a jacket on the Sunday morning walk round the park lake, and I have explained it enough times now that it seemed easier to sit down and write it out properly.

It started at the caravan, the last weekend before it went away for the winter. The cold came in early off the sea, so I put on my big black coat, the warm one, and came out to where my sister June was pouring the tea. She looked at me for a moment over the flask and said it.

Pat, love, is that Brian's?

It was not Brian's. It was mine. I had bought it myself, two winters back, because it was warm and it was sensible and it was reduced. Black, enormous, zipped to the chin, and shaped like nothing at all. I stood there on a caravan site holding a mug of tea, warm as toast, looking like a sleeping bag with a perm.

And here is the thing I want to be clear about. Nobody chooses that. It happens quietly, one sensible warm purchase at a time, until one day your own sister cannot tell your coat from your husband's.

How it happens

I used to like winter dressing. A good coat used to feel like armour, the thing that finished you off before you stepped out the door.

What changed was not me. It was what the shops decided a warm coat for a woman my age should be.

Go and look at the rails any winter. Everything warm is black or navy, cut like a duvet with armholes, and everything with any shape to it is thin as a mac and no use past October. Warm, or looking like yourself. It always seemed you could have one, never both.

And once you believe that, you stop trying. You buy the big black one because it is sensible, and you disappear into it from November to March, and nobody says anything. Except, in my case, June.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I had wrong, and I suspect I am not the only one.

I thought padded had to mean puffy. I thought warmth was a thing you bought by the armful, and the price of it was your shape, so I had stopped even picking padded jackets up off the rail.

It turns out that was never the padding.

It is the cut, whether the jacket goes in where you go in or just hangs off you like a tent. It is the length, whether it covers you properly when the wind gets up or stops short at the worst possible place. And it is the colour, or the total absence of one.

The same warmth, cut with an actual waist, in a colour that is not black, reads completely differently. It reads as a decision. That is the whole difference, and it took my sister and a flask of tea to make me see it.

The jacket is called the Nadine

It is from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now.

The jacket is called the Nadine. A padded winter jacket in a soft light green, longer in the body, with a deep hood lined in the softest grey. It comes in a dark green and a black as well, which I will come back to.

It is properly warm, which I want to say plainly because that was my first worry. Padded all the way through, and long enough to cover you when you bend for a lead or a trolley. But it is cut to follow you, not swallow you, so you stay a shape and not a silhouette of a wardrobe.

The hood deserves its own sentence. It is deep, it is lined in that soft grey, and when the weather does its worst you pull it up and feel like you have got one over on the day. And if you want the jacket plainer for town, the hood comes off. The pockets zip shut too, so keys, phone and the dog biscuits stay exactly where you put them.

What happened at the park

The first properly cold Sunday, I wore it round the lake with Wilf, my husband Brian's spaniel, who considers that walk his personal appointment.

Three women asked me about it. Three. The first was a lady with a retriever I have nodded at for two years and never once spoken to. The second caught me by the bandstand. The third was Carol, who told me I looked smart for half past eight on a Sunday, which I have decided to take as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I forgot I had it on. I was not hauling a zip up under my chin or hunching against the wind off the water. I threw a ball for Wilf, I stood about while he ignored it, and I was warm the whole time without once thinking about the coat doing it.

The next morning I put it straight back on to take my granddaughter to school, and felt completely myself at the gates. That is the rarest sort of jacket. The one that works for a muddy spaniel at eight and a coffee in town at eleven, and feels right in both.

Three things I have learned since

One. The sizing is honest. It runs from a UK 8/10 to a 16/18, and it is the same shape the whole way up, not a different jacket once you pass a certain number. I wish more places would bother with that.

Two. Warm does not have to mean buried. I am out in it before eight most mornings now and I have not once come home frozen or looking like I had been inflated. I did not believe that gap could close. It closes.

Three. The colour does half the work. I thought the light green would feel loud after years of black. It is the opposite. It is soft, it goes with everything I own, and I have had more kind words in three weeks of wearing it than in two winters of the black one.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Nadine is £49.95. It was £100.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because a proper warm winter jacket is usually the dearest thing you buy all year, and plenty of shapeless ones cost more than this.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they have a sale on as the first autumn stock comes in.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman from Northallerton had written, “Warmest coat I have owned in years, and the first one that does not make me look twice my size.” That was the one that decided it for me.

Then I stood in the hall for a good five minutes wondering whether Brian would notice a dark green one arriving as well.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat at my kitchen table with the kettle on, this is what I would say.

If you have spent the last few winters climbing into something black and enormous every morning, not because you like it but because being warm seemed to cost you yourself, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look at this one.

Not because a jacket will change your life. It will not. But there is something in catching sight of yourself in a shop window in January and recognising the woman looking back that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. And this is the first autumn stock, so once it has gone, it is gone before the cold weather has even properly arrived.

June has not mentioned Brian's coat since.

Pat