A letter from a reader

At 67, my granddaughter looked at eleven Octobers of my starling photographs and asked which one was me and which one was the bin

The only thing I write down with any regularity is the starling count in the back of our bird book every October, and Geoff says my numbers are guesswork, which they are. 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 hoodie while we were waiting for the starlings at Silverdale last Sunday, and I have explained it so many times since that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

Every year since Geoff retired, eleven of them now, we drive up to Silverdale on the last Sunday in October to watch the starlings come in over the reeds. You stand on the causeway in the cold for the best part of an hour while the light goes, and then for ten minutes the whole sky moves. Geoff takes a photograph of me in the same spot every year. At half-term my granddaughter Ellie was scrolling through them on his phone, all eleven, and she held one up and said it.

Nan, is that you, or is that the bin by the gate?

She is fourteen, and she was not wrong. A navy anorak zipped to the nose, Geoff’s old fleece underneath, a grey hat pulled down to the eyebrows. Eleven years of the most beautiful thing I see all year, and in every single photograph of it I look like something the council put there.

I did not decide to dress like that. Nobody does. You buy one sensible coat for standing about in the cold, then another, and one autumn you notice that everything you own for outdoors is navy, grey or the colour of a wet slate roof.

How it happens

I used to wear colour. For June’s fortieth I wore a burnt orange jumper that our mother said made me look like a struck match, and I loved it.

What changed was not me. It was what is on offer to a woman our age once the weather turns.

Go and look. The things meant for being outdoors are anoraks and fleeces in navy and charcoal, cut for walking briskly to the car. The cosy things are beige and shapeless, the sort of cardigan you would buy for an aunt you did not know very well.

And the comfortable things, the hoodies everybody under thirty seems to live in, I had decided were simply not for me. As far as I was concerned a hoodie was what my grandson put on when he did not want to be spoken to.

What I had wrong

I can already hear what some of you are thinking. A hoodie. At sixty-seven.

I thought exactly the same. I thought there were clothes for being comfortable and clothes for being a grown woman, and that at my age only the second sort were allowed out of the house.

It turns out that was never about the hoodie. It was about the hoodies I had seen. Grey, baggy, a slogan across the chest, the sort of thing you would not answer the door in.

What I had never seen was one that was soft and roomy and properly cosy, and also had something lovely on the front of it. Something with a bit of colour, that looked like I had picked it because I liked it.

That was all I had been missing. It took me until 67, and a fourteen-year-old with a phone, to see it.

The hoodie is called the Maria

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 long oversized hoodies, twenty of them: autumn trees, falling leaves, patchworks in rust and burgundy, even one with two black cats peering round the side. At the start of October June turned up for coffee in the cream version of mine, and I had ordered before she had finished her biscuit.

Mine is the Maria, in the burnt orange. Across the front there is a picture of five autumn trees standing together, wine red, red, orange, gold and green, on a little bed of fallen leaves. There is a narrow trim of leaves and berries round the edge of the hood and round each sleeve, and two cream drawstrings. The shoulders are dropped, the sleeves are wide and stop just below the elbow, and it comes down long, well over the hips.

It is soft and cosy against the skin, which I expected. What I did not expect was how easy it is. It goes straight on over a long-sleeved top and my jeans, the cream sleeves show below the elbow, and that is the whole outfit.

The length is the part I keep telling people about. Because it is cut big, with those dropped shoulders, it hangs rather than clings, and it comes down far enough to cover everything I would rather it covered. And when the wind came off the water on Sunday, I pulled the hood up, drew the strings in and stayed exactly where I was.

What happened at the starlings

Sunday was cold and still, the kind of evening where your breath hangs in front of you. We were on the causeway by half past four with the flask, in the same spot as every year.

Three women asked me about it before the first starlings had come in over the reeds. A young woman with a baby asleep in a sling, who wanted to know if they did it in her size. A lady with a little terrier, who said I was the only bit of colour on the whole path. And Gwyneth.

Gwyneth has been coming to watch the starlings at Silverdale every autumn for longer than we have. She can tell you roughly how many there were in every year since she started, and in all that time she has never once passed comment on anybody’s coat. She lowered her binoculars, looked me up and down and said the birds had some competition this year. I shall be living on that until Christmas.

What I noticed more than the asking was that I forgot what I had on. I stood there for an hour while the light went, cosy in all the places that mattered, and when the whole cloud of birds turned over the reeds at once, I watched them instead of thinking about how I looked.

Geoff took the photograph in the usual spot. Ellie has asked him to send her a copy.

Three things I have learned since

One. Comfortable is not the same as giving up. The things that say you have given up are the shapeless ones in no colour at all. This has a picture on the front that strangers stop to ask about.

Two. Long is your friend. A hoodie that comes down over the hips does more for you than any amount of clever tailoring. I can sit on a cold bench in it, bend down to the dog, lift the shopping out of the car, and nothing rides up.

Three. It is cut big on purpose. It is an oversized fit with dropped shoulders, and they go from a UK 8 to a UK 22. 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 Maria is £34.95. It was £70.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for an anorak that made me look like the bin.

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 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 Arnside had written, “I put it on to walk the dog and I have had more compliments in it than in my good coat.”

Then I ordered a second one, the brown, for the weeks when the orange is in the wash.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were stood on that causeway with Geoff’s flask between us, waiting for the light to go, this is what I would say.

If everything you own for the cold is navy and grey, and you have quietly stopped expecting to look like yourself between October and March, it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a hoodie will change your life. It will not. But there is something in standing out on a cold autumn evening in a bit of colour, comfortable and cosy, and still feeling like the woman you were at forty. I had 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 brown had gone in my size the first time I went back. And the first autumn stock is already going, so I would not leave it until bonfire night.

The anorak has gone to the charity shop. Ellie says I am the orange one now.

Maggie