A letter from a reader

At 67, I had stood at the poppy table for nine Novembers wrapped up like a parcel nobody had come to collect

The only thing I have written this month is my own name on the poppy rota in the church porch, and I still managed to put myself down for the wrong Saturday. I am not a writer, and it has never been my place to tell another woman what she ought to wear.

But three different women asked me about my jumper at the poppy appeal table in Holmes Chapel last Saturday, and I have explained it so many times since that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

I have done a Saturday on that table every autumn for nine years. A folding trestle outside the shop on the main road, a tray of poppies, a tin, and four hours of standing still in whatever the wind is doing. So every year I dressed for it the only way I knew. A thermal vest, a polo neck, Geoff's old fleece, my quilted gilet over the top, and a scarf wound round twice. My sister June came by with a flask last year, stood back, looked me up and down and said it.

Mags, you look like a parcel that has been left on the step.

She was not wrong. I could barely bend my arms. Every time somebody held out a pound I had to turn sideways to reach the tin, and pinning a poppy on an old gentleman's lapel was like threading a needle in oven gloves. And in every photograph the parish magazine has ever printed of the poppy appeal, there is a round navy shape at the end of the table. That is me.

I did not choose to look like that. Nobody decides to spend November dressed as a draught excluder. It happens one cold morning at a time, one more layer at a time, until the warm thing and the you thing are two completely different wardrobes.

How it happens

I used to love a jumper. When the children were small I had a soft camel one I wore to everything, and I felt like myself in it.

What changed was not me. It was what the shops seem to think a woman of our age wants when the weather turns.

Go and look. The cosy things made for us are either a shapeless sack in oatmeal, the sort of cardigan you would buy for an aunt you did not know very well, or something so fitted it clings to every bit you would rather it did not. And the things that are actually meant for standing about outside are fleeces and padded gilets in navy and grey, cut for somebody about to go and look at a boiler.

So we pile it on. Fleece over jumper over vest. We stay warm, and somewhere round the third zip we stop looking like ourselves.

What I had wrong

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

I thought cosy and looking nice were two separate jobs. You dressed warm for the poppy table, and you saved looking like yourself for lunch afterwards.

It turns out the poppy table is where I see half the village. Everybody comes past it, and most of them stop to talk.

I had been choosing between snug and smart for so long that I had stopped expecting both. Something soft and cosy that I could still move my arms in, that drapes rather than clings, and that looks like I picked it out because I liked it.

That is all I had been missing. It took me until 67, and my sister with a flask, to see it.

The jumper is called the Muriel

It is from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. They do a whole collection of these hooded poncho jumpers, more than thirty of them, stripes, leopards, plain ribbed ones and a few with a laced front. At the start of October June turned up for coffee in the navy stripe one, and I ordered mine that evening.

Mine is called the Muriel. A soft camel knit with a dark chocolate leopard pattern all over the body and the sleeves, and a plain camel hood that lies round your shoulders when it is down. There is a deep V at the neck with two drawstrings hanging from the hood. It is a proper poncho shape, wide and loose, with batwing sleeves that stop just below the elbow in a deep ribbed cuff, and a wide ribbed band at the hem that sits at the hip.

It is soft and cosy against the skin, which I expected, and I could move in it, which I did not. It goes straight over a long-sleeved top and my jeans, the long sleeves show at the cuff, and that is the whole outfit. No gilet, no fleece, no second scarf.

The shape is the part I keep telling people about. Because it is a poncho, it drapes from the shoulders and skims over everything rather than clinging to it. The sleeves are so roomy that I can reach right across the tray. And when the drizzle came in at eleven, I put the hood up and pulled the drawstrings in, and carried on.

What happened at the poppy table

Saturday was grey and damp, the kind of morning where the pavement never quite dries. I set the table up outside the shop at nine, the tin on the left and the tray on the right, the same as every year.

Three women asked me about it before the church clock had struck twelve. A young mother with a pushchair who bought two poppies and asked where the jumper was from before she had found her purse, a woman I know to nod to from the butcher's queue, and Margery, who has organised our poppy appeal for longer than anybody can remember and has never once commented on what anybody wore.

She came round at half eleven to swap the tins, looked up from counting and said I looked like I had come to the table on purpose rather than been sent. From Margery, that is practically a medal.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I did not think about it once. I pinned poppies on lapels without a fight. I reached for the change without turning sideways. I stood there for four hours and did not spend them feeling like something wrapped for the post.

On the Sunday I wore it to June's for lunch, and on the Monday round the field with the labrador, and nobody would have guessed it had spent Saturday outside a shop with a collecting tin. It went from the poppy table to Sunday lunch to the dog walk, and it was right for all three.

Three things I have learned since

One. Cosy does not have to mean bulky. One soft layer that drapes will do more for you than four that fight each other. I have retired the gilet.

Two. You need your arms. If you cannot reach across a table or up to a lapel in it, it is not working for you. The batwing sleeves on these are wide enough that I forget they are there.

Three. It is cut big on purpose. It is an oversized, relaxed fit, and they go from a UK 8 to a UK 14. I took my usual size and there is plenty of room for a long-sleeved top underneath.

About the price

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

The Muriel is £38.95. It was £78.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a padded gilet that made me look like a tea cosy.

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 at the moment while the first of the 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 Goostrey had written, “I stand at the school gate in it every morning and it is the first thing I have owned that is cosy and does not make me look like I have given up.”

Then I ordered a second one, a plain ribbed one in green, for the weeks when the leopard is in the wash.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat behind that trestle table with June’s flask between us and the tin rattling every few minutes, this is what I would say.

If you have been dressing for the cold in so many layers that you no longer recognise yourself in the photographs, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a jumper will change your life. It will not. But there is something in standing out in a raw November morning and still feeling like yourself, and I had quietly stopped expecting it. I would rather you did not stop expecting it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the middle sizes go first, which I found out because the green one had gone in my size when I first went back and I had to wait for it. And the first of the autumn stock is already going, so I would not leave it until the frosts.

The gilet is in the charity bag. I am the leopard at the end of the poppy table now.

Maggie