A letter from a reader

At 68, every coat I owned stopped an inch short of where the cold gets in

This is a letter about a draught. Specifically, the one that has been getting down the back of my neck every autumn since about 1990.

I am not in the habit of writing to shops, or about them. But three different women asked me about this jacket at the Wednesday market, and I have now explained it enough times that writing it down once seemed the sensible option.

Here is the problem, and I will bet money you have it too. You stand at the bus stop in October in a perfectly good coat. Your chest is warm. Your arms are warm. And the wind finds the one inch of you the coat does not reach.

Every coat I have ever owned stopped an inch short of my chin.

Collars that fold flat and lie there decoratively. Necklines cut for autumn in a catalogue rather than autumn in Leeds. Forty odd years of it, and my answer was always the same. Wind it up with a scarf and get on with it.

I did not think of it as a problem you could fix. That is the bit worth saying plainly. You assume that is simply what coats are, the way you assume it will rain on a bank holiday.

The inch nobody talks about

Look at the coats in any shop this autumn. All the effort has gone into the middle of them. Pockets here, panels there, a nice bit of stitching.

And then the collar. An afterthought. A flat fold of fabric that gives up at the collarbone, as if the wind has agreed not to go above it.

The wind has agreed no such thing. Anyone who walks anywhere in this country knows the neck is where the cold does its business, and yet you can stand in a shop surrounded by two hundred coats and not find three that do anything about it.

What I had wrong

I thought the answer was scarves. I own eleven.

It is not scarves. A scarf is a repair job on a coat that was not finished. It slips, it gapes, it comes undone in the queue at the butcher's, and you spend half the walk retying it.

The answer is a coat that was cut properly in the first place, with a collar that stands up, reaches the chin, and fastens there. Once you have worn one, the whole scarf carry-on looks like what it always was. A workaround.

The jacket is called the Cornelia

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 Cornelia. A soft pale grey with a fleck to it, buttons down the front, and the collar in question, a high one that stands right up to the chin and fastens with a neat little tab so it stays put.

It is soft and light rather than stiff, so it goes on over a jumper without a wrestling match, and it hangs relaxed instead of clinging. It comes down to the thigh, so your back is covered when you bend, which anyone with an allotment will appreciate. And the two patch pockets on the front are proper pockets. Keys, glasses, shopping list, gloves. Nothing has fallen out of them yet, and I have given them every chance.

That is the whole of it. It is not clever. It is a jacket somebody finished properly.

What happened at the market

I wore it buttoned to the top at the Wednesday market, on one of those raw grey mornings we specialise in.

Three women asked me about it between the fruit stall and the bread van. One of them was Sylvia, who I have known for twenty five years and who last complimented me at my daughter's wedding.

She looked me up and down and said I looked warm. From Sylvia, that is a five star review.

What I noticed more than the compliments was what I did not do. I did not hunch. I did not tuck my chin down into my chest like a pigeon, which it turns out I have been doing every autumn for years. The wind was there. It simply was not getting in.

I had it on again the next morning to take the bins out, and it was just as right for that, which is the real test of anything.

Three things worth knowing

One. The collar does the work of a coat and a scarf together. Stand it up, fasten the tab, and the draught has nowhere to go. My scarves have not been out of the drawer since it arrived.

Two. The pockets are not decorative. Two big square ones, deep enough to swallow keys, glasses and a list, and I have stopped carrying a bag for short errands entirely.

Three. The sizing is honest. It runs from a UK 8/10 to a 22/24, the same relaxed cut the whole way, and it comes in eleven colours. I took the grey because I am me. The red is very good if you are braver.

About the price

I am careful with money and I will not pretend otherwise, so the price was the first thing I checked.

The Cornelia is £32.95. It was £66.00.

My assumption was that at that price something would be missing, because a jacket that solves the collar problem is the sort of thing the high street would charge double for and still get wrong.

Nothing is missing that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, no department store taking a slice in the middle, and this is the launch price on their first autumn stock.

I do not trust perfect scores, so I read the reviews before ordering. Just over three hundred of them at 4.2 stars, which sounded like real people rather than robots, so I read on. One woman had written, “The collar comes right up to my chin. I walked to the shops in a wind that usually goes straight through me and it did not get in.” That settled it.

If you were stood at my kitchen table

I would put the kettle on and say this.

If you have spent forty autumns doing up a perfectly good coat and then losing the day's warmth through your neck, it was never you buying the wrong scarf. It was the coats not being finished. This one is finished.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the first autumn stock is already going. Eleven colours, UK 8/10 to 22/24, and once this batch has gone it has gone before the proper cold even arrives.

The draught and I are no longer on speaking terms.

Pat