A letter from a reader

At 67, I had spent thirty winters in three dark layers, and I looked every bit as cold as I felt

The only thing I wrote all last Saturday was prices, on little round stickers, for what felt like four hundred donated teacups, and my daughter still went round after me redoing half of them because my fifty pences look like fives. 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 jacket in the church hall that afternoon, and I have now explained it so many times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

It started a year ago. Our daughter lives over in Leek now, and she had signed me up to help sort the donations for her church Christmas fair. That hall only has the heating on for a Sunday, so I went prepared. Two cardigans, my navy anorak zipped to the chin, hood up for the first hour. At the end of the afternoon somebody took a photograph of the whole sorting team for the parish newsletter, and my daughter showed it to me on her phone in the car.

Mum, you look like you have come to read the meter.

She was laughing, and so was I, until I looked properly. Every other woman in that photograph had a bit of colour about her. I was a navy parcel at the end of the row. And when I thought about it, I had looked like that every winter for thirty years, from the first frost until the clocks went forward.

I did not set out to dress like that, and I want to be clear about it. Nobody decides to spend every winter looking like the woman who has come about the boiler. It happens one cold morning at a time, until your daughter shows you a photograph in a car park and you cannot argue with it.

How it happens

I used to love a winter coat. When Geoff and I were first married I had a camel one with big buttons, and I felt like a film star every time I put it on to go to the pictures.

What changed was not me. It was what was on the rails.

Go and look at the winter coats for women our age. On one side there are padded things in navy, black and a sort of mushroom colour, built like sleeping bags and every bit as heavy. On the other there are the cheerful ones, cut short and tight for girls who are only ever outside for the walk from the car to the shop.

So you do what I did. You buy the dark padded one because it is warm, you put two cardigans underneath because it still is not warm enough indoors, and by December you have stopped expecting winter clothes to be anything more than a way of not being cold.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I think a lot of us have.

I thought warm had to mean heavy, and heavy had to mean dark. I thought the more layers I had on, the warmer I would be, and that cheerful was something you saved for the summer.

It turns out it was never the layers. It was what the warmth was made of.

One soft, light jacket that is properly warm on its own does the work of the anorak and both cardigans, and because it is not trying to be a sleeping bag, it can be a colour you actually like looking at. Soft camel, grey, cream and oatmeal, in wide bands, nothing loud about it at all.

Warm or like yourself. I had been choosing between the two every October for thirty years, and I had no idea there was a jacket that did both. It took me until 67 to find it.

The jacket is called the Sarah

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

It is called the Sarah. A soft, fluffy zip-up jacket in wide bands of camel, grey, cream and oatmeal, with a hood lined in white, two little white drawcords, one zip all the way up the front, and neat ribbed cuffs and hem. It comes down past the hip, so it covers you where it matters on a cold chair. They do it in six colours as well, which I will come back to.

The first thing you notice is how little it weighs. I had got so used to coats that sat on my shoulders like a shopping bag that I kept checking I had it on. And yet it is properly warm, the sort of warm that means the second cardigan stays in the drawer. The ribbed cuffs sit snugly at the wrist so the draught cannot run up your arms, and it keeps the wind off when you step out to the car.

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

What happened at the church hall

This year the sorting afternoon was the second Saturday in October. Trestle tables down both sides of the hall, boxes of donations under every one of them, and a tea urn in the corner that takes forty minutes to boil.

I wore the brown Sarah for the first time, zipped up, with my navy trousers and nothing underneath but a thin jumper. Three women asked me about it before the urn had boiled. One of them was Thelma, who has run the bric-a-brac table at that fair for thirty years and has never said a word to me about anything but chipped saucers.

She looked up from her price stickers and told me I looked like I was running the fair this year, not sorting for it. From Thelma, that is practically a vote of thanks.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I did not think about the cold once. Other years I have spent the afternoon with my hands up my sleeves and my shoulders round my ears. This year I priced the whole teacup table with my hands out and my back straight, and when they finally opened the side door to carry the boxes out, I did not even reach for my hood.

The next morning I put it straight back on to walk the dog along the lane, and felt completely myself in it. A jacket for a cold church hall on a Saturday and a wet lane on a Sunday. I do not think I have ever owned one of those before.

Three things I have learned since

One. One layer is enough. I used to dress in three for a cold room and still feel the chill. Now it is a thin jumper and the Sarah, and I am warmer than I ever was in the anorak.

Two. The sizing is simple. It comes in a UK 8, 10, a 12 to 14, and then every size up to a 24. I am usually a 14 and the 12 to 14 was right for me.

Three. Soft colour is easier than you think. I had always thought of a jacket with stripes in it as something for younger women. These are wide, gentle bands of camel, grey and cream, and they go with navy, with brown, with my old jeans. Nobody has once said I look like I am trying too hard.

About the price

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

The Sarah is £31.95. It was £64.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I paid more than that for the anorak, and it was the anorak that got me called the meter reader.

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 winter 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 Biddulph had written, “I bought it for walking the dog and now I wear it everywhere. Light as a feather and warmer than my big coat.”

Then I ordered the wine red as well, and gave it to my daughter, with a note that said, for the next time you take a photograph.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat on two of those cold plastic chairs with a cup of tea from the urn, this is what I would say.

If you have spent the last few winters dressed in three dark layers, and you know perfectly well you look every bit as cold as you feel, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a jacket will change your life. It will not. But there is something in catching sight of yourself in the hall window and seeing a woman who looks warm and cheerful rather than wrapped up for the post, and I had quietly given up on it. I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first, which I found out because the 12 to 14 in wine red had gone by the time I went back for my daughter’s and I had to wait for it. And the first of the winter stock is already going, so I would not leave it until the frosts start.

My old navy anorak went on the jumble table. Thelma priced it at a pound.

Maggie