A letter from a reader

At 68, I had spent thirty winters dressed to disappear, until my granddaughter walked straight past me in town

I have signed forty-odd years of Christmas cards with love from Pat and Brian, and that is about the size of my writing career. So I will say it now, before you get your hopes up. I am not a writer, and I have never thought it my business to tell another woman what she ought to wear out of the house.

But three different women asked me about this jacket at the rugby on Sunday, and I have now explained it so many times that it seemed easier to write it down once, properly.

I am careful with money and I will not pretend otherwise. When I buy a winter coat I buy it to last, and for thirty-odd winters that has meant navy, black or a sort of mud. Sensible. Goes with everything. Shows nothing. My last one was a dark navy anorak with the hood that never quite stayed up, and I wore it from the first cold morning in October until the clocks went forward.

I did not think anything of it until last month, when our granddaughter Ellie arranged to meet me off the bus in town. She is fifteen. I got off, stood by the shelter, and watched her walk straight past me. Then she came back the other way and walked past me again. When she finally found me she did not say hello. She said this.

Nana, you look like every other coat in Leeds.

I laughed, because you do. But on the bus home I looked round at the other women my age, and every one of us was in navy, black or mud, and not one of us looked like anybody in particular. She was fifteen, and she was right.

I will not pretend I chose to look like that. Nobody sets out to be a woman her own granddaughter cannot find at a bus stop. It creeps up on you, one sensible coat at a time.

How it happens

I was not always like this. When I was nineteen I had a padded ski jacket with stripes across the chest that I had saved up for out of my wages, and I wore it to everything, including places that had never seen a ski slope.

What changed was not me. It was the shops, and I suspect a good many of you will know exactly what I mean.

Look at the winter coats they put out for a woman my age. Black. Navy. Something they call taupe, which is mud with ideas. The bright ones are all cut for girls of twenty with no hips and no need to lift a shopping bag. So you are told, without anybody saying it, that colour is for the young and warmth is for the rest of us. Seen, or sensible. Pick one.

So you do what I did. You pick sensible, and then you pick it again every October, and you stop expecting anybody to look twice.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I had most wrong.

I thought wanting to be seen was vanity, and that a woman of 68 who wears stripes is making a spectacle of herself. I thought the dark coat was modesty. It was not. It was hiding.

It was Ellie who put me right, again. She was round for her tea the week after the bus stop, and she was going through the old photograph box on the sideboard, as she does, when she held one up. Me at nineteen, on a wall at Scarborough, in that striped ski jacket, grinning like I owned the place.

She looked at it, and then at me, and said, Nana, why did you stop dressing like her?

I did not have an answer. Seen or sensible. I had spent thirty winters choosing sensible, and it took a fifteen-year-old to point out I had never actually been asked to choose.

The jacket is called the Diane

It is from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique I have bought a few bits from for a while now. I went and looked that same evening, mostly to prove to Ellie that nothing like that jacket existed any more.

It is called the Diane. A padded, quilted jacket in a deep navy, with a burgundy top and hood, and four bright stripes straight across the chest and the sleeves, blue, red, orange and yellow. Ribbed cuffs, a zip right up the front, and it sits on the hip. It comes in a brighter blue and a black as well, which I will come back to.

It is warm, which was the first thing I checked, because I have not bought a coat for looks since I was nineteen and I was not about to start being daft now. The padding keeps the cold off on a raw afternoon, and the quilting keeps it neat, so I look like a woman in a jacket rather than a woman in a duvet.

The cut is relaxed without being shapeless. There is room for a proper jumper underneath, I can get my arms up to reach the top shelf or clap a try, and it goes over jeans for the allotment or my good trousers for Sunday lunch without looking wrong with either.

There is nothing clever about it. It is simply a warm winter jacket that looks like somebody is wearing it.

What happened at the rugby

Brian has had a season ticket at Headingley for longer than we have had the house, and I go with him on a Sunday when the weather is kind, which in Leeds is not often.

I wore the Diane for the first time over a cream jumper and my jeans. A woman in the next seats asked me where it was from before kick-off. The lady on the tea bar asked while she was pouring my tea at half-time.

And the third was Brian’s sister Marjorie, who comes with us twice a season and has not said one nice thing about my clothes in forty-five years. She looked me up and down in the car park and said, Well, we will not lose you in here, Pat.

From Marjorie, that is a standing ovation.

What I noticed more than the compliments was that I stood through a cold second half and did not once shrink down inside my collar. I walked back to the car with my hands in my sleeves and my chin up, and felt, for the first time in a long time, like somebody might pick me out of a crowd and be glad to.

I had it on again on the Monday for the allotment, and on the Wednesday to meet Ellie off the bus. She spotted me from the other end of the street.

Three things I have learned since

One. Buy it for the size you are now. It goes from a UK 8 right up to a UK 20, and the cut is relaxed, so there is no need to size up to fit a jumper underneath. I am a 16 and I took the 16, and there is room for my thick cream jumper and nothing silly.

Two. The colour goes with more than you think. I worried the stripes would fight with everything. They do not. Jeans, black trousers, a navy skirt for church, and it looks like I meant it every time. I have not bought one thing to go with it.

Three. People talk to you. I had forgotten this. In the dark coat nobody said a word. In the Diane I have been asked about it at the bus stop, in the butcher’s and once by a man at the allotments, which Brian has not stopped going on about.

About the price

I will be straight with you, because I am careful with money and I have already told you as much. The price made me suspicious.

The Diane is £42.95. It was £86.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because the navy anorak cost me more than that, and it had been hiding me for years.

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 do not trust a perfect score, so I 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 is exactly why I read on. One woman from Malton had written, “I have worn black coats since my forties. My daughter said this one made me look like me again.”

That was the one that decided it for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you were sat across my kitchen table with the kettle on, this is what I would say.

If you have spent every winter in navy, black and mud, doing up the zip and disappearing until spring, 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 being warm and still being seen that I had stopped expecting, and I would rather you did not stop expecting it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. And the first of the autumn stock is already going, so I would not leave it until the first frost.

Ellie found me first time on Wednesday. She said I looked like the girl in the photograph.

Pat