A letter from a reader

At 67, my sister watched me take off my cosy old cardigan to go out and said, Maggie, you are only ever comfortable when nobody can see you

I will get one confession out of the way first. I am not a writer, and in sixty-seven years I have never once told another woman what she ought to put on her back.

But three different women asked me about a coat at the pictures on Tuesday afternoon, and after the third one I thought I had better write it down properly instead of explaining it in the queue for tea.

It started with my sister June. She turned up on a Sunday afternoon without ringing first, the way she does, and I opened the door in the grey cardigan I have worn round the house for eleven years. The one with the stretched pockets and the elbows gone shiny. We decided to go into town for the film, so I went upstairs, took the cardigan off, and came down buttoned into my good stiff navy coat. June watched the whole performance from the bottom of the stairs and said it.

Maggie, you are only ever comfortable when nobody can see you.

I told her not to be daft. Then I sat through the whole film, cold and a bit pinched under the arms, and I thought about it all the way home. She was right. Every soft, warm thing I owned lived indoors. The minute there was any chance of being seen, I swapped comfort for something stiff and sensible, and I had been doing it so long I had stopped noticing.

Nobody decides to live like that. It creeps up on you. One day the comfortable things are the house clothes, and the going-out things are the ones that pinch, and you simply accept that is how it is now.

How it happens

We are all brought up to think there are two sorts of clothes. There are the things you wear for yourself, and the things you wear for other people.

The things for yourself are allowed to be soft. The old cardigan, the fleecy thing, whatever you pull on when the heating has not come on yet. Nobody expects them to look like anything, and neither do we.

The things for other people are meant to be proper. And somewhere along the line, proper came to mean stiff. A coat you button up and hold yourself straight in. A coat that looks respectable in the car park and feels like a cardboard box by the time you have sat down.

So we spend half our lives changing. Cosy at home, uncomfortable in public, and never once both at the same time.

What I had wrong

I had it in my head that cosy meant scruffy. That anything soft enough to curl up in could not possibly look like I had made an effort.

It turns out it was never the softness that made my old cardigan look scruffy. It was that it had no shape to it. It was short and saggy and stopped at the worst possible place, and it had been stretched out of any line it ever had.

Give the same softness some length and a proper collar, and it stops being a house cardigan. It becomes a coat. A cosy one, yes, but a coat, and you can wear it anywhere.

The coat is called the Julie

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

The coat is called the Julie. A long, chunky knitted coat in a soft warm beige, with a wide shawl collar that runs all the way down the front, deep turned-back cuffs, and two big pockets. There is nothing to do up at all. You just put it on. It comes in a soft brown as well, which I will come back to.

It falls to just above the knee, so it covers everything that wants covering when you sit down. The collar lies flat and frames your face instead of standing up round your ears. And because it is open at the front, it goes on over a blouse, a jumper or a plain top without any fuss at all.

It feels exactly like the cardigan you would never answer the door in. It just does not look like it.

What happened at the pictures

Here is the part that made me write this. Our little picture house in town is always cold. Everybody knows it. You go to the Tuesday afternoon film with a scarf in your bag and you still come out chilly.

I kept the Julie on for the whole film. Before it had even started, the lady next to me leaned over and asked where it was from. In the interval, a younger woman behind us in the queue for tea asked the same thing and took a photograph of the collar for her mother.

And then Wendy, who has sold the tickets there for twenty years and has never said a single word to me beyond enjoy the film, stopped me on the way out and said I was the first person all year to keep her coat on in there and still look dressed for it. From Wendy, that is a review in the paper.

What I noticed more than any of that, though, was that I was comfortable. Not putting up with it. Actually comfortable, sitting in a cold picture house for two hours, in public, looking like I meant it.

The next morning I put it straight back on to take the labrador across the field, with a dog biscuit in each pocket, and Geoff asked if I was going somewhere nice. I was only going to the stile and back.

Three things I have learned since

One. Nothing to do up is a gift. No buttons to fiddle with when your fingers are cold, no belt to lose. You put it on, you go. At our age I did not know how much I needed that until I had it.

Two. The length does the work. A short cardigan looks like a house cardigan. The same softness falling to the knee looks like a coat. That is the whole trick, and I wish somebody had told me years ago.

Three. The sizing is honest. It runs from a UK 8 to a 20, and it is cut generously enough to go over a jumper without pulling. I took my usual size and there is room to move.

About the price

I will be straight with you, because the price was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Julie is £41.95. It was £84.00.

My first thought was that at that price it would be thin, or it would bobble the first time it went near a handbag. You can pay more than that on the high street for a cardigan that will not see Christmas.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so nobody is taking a cut in the middle, and they have a sale on while the first autumn stock comes through.

I did what I expect you are doing now and read the reviews first. 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 Whitstable had written, ‘It is like wearing a blanket that knows how to behave in public.’ I laughed out loud, because that is it exactly.

Then I ordered the brown one as well. It is a softer, greyer brown than I expected, which suits me rather better, and June has already asked when she can borrow it.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in my kitchen with a pot of tea, and you had kept your coat on because my kitchen is never quite warm enough, this is what I would say.

Think about the softest thing you own. The one you live in at home and would never let anybody see. Now think about the coat you put on over the top of it to go out. If those two have never once been the same thing, it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look at this one.

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

I am still comfortable. It is just that now, people can see me.

Maggie