A letter from a reader

I have a coat I like and a coat I wear, and for years they were not the same coat

I am 66, and until this spring my winter went like this. There was the good coat, which hung in the hall doing nothing because it was for occasions, and there was the navy one I actually put on, which was warm and shapeless and made every single thing underneath it irrelevant.

That is the bit that gets me about coats. It is the only garment anybody outside your house actually sees. You can put real thought into what you have on and then pull a sack over it at the front door.

I found this one through my sister, who has developed an irritating habit of being right. It is from The Winslow Sisters, the small shop in Richmond that Emma and Alison have run for eleven years, and the coat is called the Margaret.

It is a dark green wool with a fine tan check running through it, and the check is doing the work. From across a car park it reads as a proper coat rather than as outerwear. It is single breasted with three tan buttons, cut straight, and it finishes just below the knee, which means a skirt is actually covered instead of hanging out of the bottom.

It is the first winter coat I have owned that does not cancel out whatever I have put on underneath.

The wool has some substance to it without being one of those coats you cannot lift your arms in. I have had it over a jumper and over nothing but a shirt and it has been right both times. The pockets are proper welt pockets, set at a height where you can actually get your hands in them, which sounds like nothing until you have spent a winter with a coat where you cannot.

It was £58.95, down from £180, because they are clearing the run. I had been putting off replacing the navy one for three winters on the grounds that a decent coat is two hundred pounds, and it turns out that was only true until it was not.

The sizes run from a UK 8 to a UK 20. I take the 16 and it goes over a jumper without pulling across the back, which is where I usually come unstuck.

Emma has written her own piece about why they made it in green rather than the usual three colours, and what she argued about with the factory. It is here if you like knowing that sort of thing.

If your good coat is hanging in the hall doing nothing while you go out in the other one, have a look at this before the run is gone.