Manchester Boutique ad: The jacket three women asked me about at the church hall

This feels a little strange to share. I am 67 and I am not one for putting things on Facebook. But three different women asked me about my jacket at the church hall on Saturday, where we were sorting everything for the Christmas fair, and it started to feel a bit mean keeping it to myself. It is from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. They have a sale on at the moment. The jacket 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 and neat ribbed cuffs and hem. I will tell you what I told them at the table. It is the first winter jacket I have bought in years that does not look like it was made for somebody half my age, and does not look like I have given up either. That is a much narrower gap than it sounds. It is properly warm, the sort of warm that lets you take off the two cardigans underneath, and yet it weighs next to nothing on your shoulders. The ribbed cuffs keep the draught from running up your sleeves, it keeps the wind off when you step outside, and it zips all the way up when the hall is at its coldest. And the colours are soft and cheerful at once, which is not a thing I expected to find in a winter jacket at my age. That church hall only has the heating on for a Sunday, and for years I have sorted the fair in my navy anorak zipped to the chin, looking as though I had come to read the meter. This year Thelma, who has run the bric-a-brac table for thirty years and has never once said a word to me about anything but chipped saucers, looked up from her price stickers and told me I looked like I was running the fair, not sorting for it. From Thelma, that is practically a vote of thanks. I had it on again the next morning to walk the dog along the lane, and felt completely myself. That is the rarest sort of jacket. The one you can wear in a cold church hall all afternoon, and out on a wet lane with the dog the next morning, and feel right in either way. I did go and read the reviews before I ordered a second one. 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. The same things kept coming up. One woman from Cheadle had written, “Warm as toast and light as anything. I have stopped wearing a coat over the top of it, and three people at church have asked where it came from.” That was the one that decided it for me. The reason I am posting today rather than next week is that the sale is on now and the middle sizes are already going. They do it in six colours, brown, sky blue, black, wine red, green and purple, from a UK 8 to a 24, the same cut the whole way up, which I wish more places would bother with. The first winter stock is going quickly, and I would not leave it until the frosts start. If you have spent the last few winters dressed in three dark layers and looking every bit as cold as you felt, this is where I would start. — Maggie