A letter from a reader

At 67, my sister found a photograph of me in the doorway of our old orange camper van and said, Maggie, you used to be the fun one

Geoff found me writing this at the kitchen table and asked if I had volunteered for the parish newsletter, which tells you how often I write anything at all. I am not a writer, and I have never once thought it was my business to tell another woman what she ought to carry about with her.

But three different women asked me about my makeup bag in a beach café in Perranporth last Saturday, and I have explained it so many times since that it seemed easier to sit down and write it out properly.

It started in September. My sister June was clearing out her loft and turned up with a shoebox of old photographs she thought I should have. Near the bottom was one of me in a sunhat, sitting in the open side door of the orange camper van Geoff and I had when the children were small, with a flask in one hand and a bucket and spade in the other. June held it up and looked at it for a long time, and then she looked at me, and she said it.

Maggie, you used to be the fun one.

I laughed, and then I went and fetched my handbag, because I wanted to prove her wrong. Grey purse. Navy umbrella. Brown glasses case. And a grey washbag that Geoff was given free with something so long ago that neither of us can remember what. Not one single thing in there that anybody would have looked at twice.

I did not decide to become the sensible one. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody does. It happens quietly, one practical purchase at a time, until your sister holds up a photograph and you hardly recognise the woman in it.

How it happens

We had that van for years. Every summer we drove it down to Cornwall with the children asleep in the back and the windows rattling, and parked up above the sea at St Agnes, and I do not think I owned a single sensible thing the whole time.

Then the youngest left home, the van went to a young couple with three small children of their own, and something else went with it.

It was not only me. Go and look at what the shops think a woman our age should carry. Black zip pouches. Grey ones. Navy if you are feeling reckless. All of it described as practical or discreet, which is a polite way of saying nobody expects you to want anything else.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy the grey one because it is fine. Nobody says anything, which is rather the point.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I had most wrong, and I suspect a lot of us have.

I thought you had to choose. Sensible or fun. Useful or cheerful. And somewhere along the way I had decided that at my age the grown up choice was always the sensible one, and the fun things were for grandchildren.

It turns out that was never the choice at all.

A thing can be perfectly useful and still make you smile when you open your handbag. The two were never opposites. I had simply stopped looking for anything that was both, and the shops had stopped offering it.

The orange one is the Sunrover

I found it the week before Geoff and I went back to St Agnes for the first time in years. It is from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly looking after women our age for a few years now.

The bag is called the Sunrover. A quilted makeup bag shaped like a little camper van, bright orange on top and red underneath, with a row of windows along the side, a big yellow sun, a white peace sign, little flowers and two round headlamps on the front. It is very nearly our old van, sun and all. I ordered it that evening and did not tell Geoff until it arrived.

Here is the sensible part, because I have not lost that entirely. It is roomy. My whole week away went into it, and it still closed. The zip along the roof keeps everything together, so nothing escapes into the bottom of the holdall. It packs easily and it stores easily, and it has been in and out of my handbag every day since.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is just a makeup bag that somebody thought about.

What happened in Perranporth

It rained most of the week, so on the Saturday we took the labrador along the sand at Perranporth anyway and then went and steamed up the beach café with everybody else.

I stood the Sunrover on the table to find my reading glasses for the menu. The woman drying her spaniel at the next table said it was the best thing she had seen all week. The girl who brought our teas asked where it was from. And a lady in the queue came over to tell me she had driven a van exactly that colour once, and we talked about it until her toasted teacake went cold.

Geoff, who has not noticed a single thing I have carried in forty years, picked it up, turned it round, and said it was the right orange. Coming from Geoff, I am having that framed.

What I noticed more than the attention, though, was that I had worried about the wrong thing. I had been quietly dreading what people would think of a woman of 67 with a cartoon camper van in her handbag. Not one person thought anything of the sort. They just wanted to talk about their own vans.

The pink one is the Daisyrove

When we got home I went straight back to the website and ordered a second one, for June.

Hers is the Daisyrove. Same little camper van shape, but pink and purple, with sunny yellow windows and big white daisies all over the roof and the sides, and a pale blue peace sign on the front. It looks like June did when she was nineteen, if I am honest.

I posted it with a card that said, So were you. She rang me the morning it came and did not say anything for a moment, and then she said she had taken it straight to her book club to show everybody, which is the least sensible thing June has done in about thirty years.

Three things I have learned since

One. Nobody thinks it is childish. I was braced for a look, and I have not had one. What I have had instead is a great many conversations with strangers, every single one of them about a holiday.

Two. Cheerful does not mean impractical. It does everything my grey washbag did, and it holds more. The difference is that I can find it in my handbag without looking, because there is nothing else in there that colour.

Three. Buy the other one for the other fun one. There is a whole row of designs, daisies and sunflowers and forests and mountains, and every one of us has a sister or a friend who used to be the fun one too.

About the price

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

Mine is the medium Sunrover, which is £29.95 at the moment. It was £50.00.

The small is £24.95 and the large is £34.95, and it is the same price whichever design you choose, so June's cost exactly what mine did. My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a grey washbag that came apart at the zip.

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 run a sale to move each season's stock along.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and read the reviews before I ordered June's. 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 Camelford had written, “My husband laughed when it arrived. Now he asks to borrow it for his shaving things when we go away.” That was the one that made me laugh out loud.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in the cottage kitchen with a pot of tea and the rain on the window, this is what I would say.

If everything in your handbag is grey, and has been for so long that you cannot remember choosing it, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a makeup bag will change your life. It will not. But there is something in opening your handbag and smiling at what is in there 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 at the moment and the first autumn stock is already going. And they come in a whole run of designs, so once the one you want has sold through, that is that.

It turns out I was still the fun one. I had just been keeping her in a grey bag.

Maggie