I don't understand coats

In which I buy a coat, although still struggle to comprehend its exact purpose.

This is a picture of a bunny, because the evil book of face now uses your first image as a post thumbnail, whether you like it or not, and without this bunny, that would have been the truly awful photograph of a half-finished milkshake that is now (thanks to the bunny) second on the blog post. Bunny to the rescue! A good friend of mine once bought a bunny to assist with the process of buying a computer. A computer was purchased, and the internet connectivity is markedly better when the bunny is close by. Just sayin'. Yay for bunnies.

Tonight there are sausages for tea, or at least there will be soon. Smells all sausagey. There are no bunnies in the sausages. There's leek and mustard, and presumably pork. And roasted beetroot which I'm quite proud of. I am having a crisis of condiment choice, and may have to go for mayonnaise, ketchup AND chutney because I am incapable of narrowing down that particular short-list.

Decisiveness. That might be what tonight's epistle is about. It could happen.

You'd get 18 points for "decisive" in a game of scrabble. Plus the fairly likely using-all-your-tiles bonus. If I ever get the word "decisive" down in a game, I'll feel very proud of myself and endeavour to let you know.

I week ago I was being all smug and unbearable about how I had managed to do some exercise. That was Tuesday evening. On Wednesday morning I woke up with a sore throat, but went to the swimming pool anyway. Where the bloody fire alarm went off, and I wound up standing around in the cold, in my swimsuit. So I spent Wednesday evening and most of Thursday in bed, being pathetic and leaking snot. Probably serves me right for something.

By Saturday I was a bit less dead, and having been declared "probably not contagious" by someone who is a Doctor, albeit a real one and therefore not of much medical use, I ventured out of the house. I live a busy and varied life. We built some Ikea furniture, and went in to town to wander the International Market and go for these awesome milkshakes.

Ok, I'm sorry the picture's crap. We got over-excited and drank/ate most of it before I even thought to get a picture. Instagram generation I may be, but I'm not very good at it. There was squirty cream and a whole biscuit on top, and it was amazing. Honest.

And I did all that wearing a huge brown Arran jumper that used to belong to L's Great Uncle. It's an amazing thing, but should probably be kept for wearing in the house and on camping trips. Because it's now November, and because my go-to hoodie is well, covered in chocolate stains, I was wearing this jumper in place of a coat.

The jumper, in it's natural rural environment. Where being big enough to keep me decent comes in handy.

So while this is a fairly awesome item of clothing, me wearing it pretty much all weekend (ok, and on Monday as well) is a sign that I haven't quite figured out coats just yet.

I just took a scroll (like a stroll, but less energetic) through my facebook pictures, and this thing is everywhere. Every other picture. I need to stop wearing this thing when I should actually be wearing a coat.

Frost, ice, big hat and mittens. Yet still no coat, only the jumper. It's knitted, kiddo - it's full of holes!

The problem here is deep and meaningful. Or at least I really hope it is, because I've always wanted to be deep and profound.

• I grew up in the North East of England, where coat-wearing is a bit of a cultural no-no, so I never quite figured out what sort of thing was appropriate for what sort of temperature, I just kept sneaking in extra hidden layers.
• I always wanted to be a Ninja. Ninjas don't wear coats. It's really hard to creep up on someone in a coat that swooshes when you walk. Waterproof trousers bug me even more for this exact reason. 
• I moved to Aberdeen and spent that first winter in a very cheap, poorly maintained, top floor flat on top of a hill. So that Christmas I fetched a coat that I had been bought for a winter trip to Germany. It's warm. Warm enough to not die in properly cold places. It came with me on a January trip to Finland, and I didn't get exposure and die. Where I'm trying to go here is that the coat I do have, whilst pretty darn good, is too warm for most of the time in the city, in Aberdeen. I wear it for a few minutes, then I wind up getting warm and sweaty or having to carry it. So I don't tend to bother with it until there's at least some snow on the ground. 
• Coats are expensive. Hoodies are less so. 
• I'm quite long, and not particularly wide. Coats don't understand me. All this "leaving room for a jumper" business never made sense. Why would I need to leave room for a jumper? It's a coat. Surely it's job is to keep me warm. All that happens is that there is extra space around the edges for the cold to come in through.
• What sort of coat do you even wear when it's too cold for a hoodie but not baltic enough for the full Arctic Expedition getup?
• My internal thermometer is crap.
• Really what I actually want is for fashion to include cloaks. To be able to walk down the street at 2 in the morning in a huge white (or other colour of your choice) cloak (which looks suspiciously curtain-y) and not turn heads. As a total aside, I once (aged about 15) drank so much vodka after a night of Scottish Country Dancing, that I only managed the walk home by concentrating on nothing other than following a man in a cloak. Cloak stories in the comments, if you feel the need to share.

Knitwear, fire and cloaks. That's actually how we should go about keeping warm. 

This story does end. The story ends with me going to TKMaxx after work, and trying on pretty much everything in the shop. Smart grown-up coats, ski jackets, strange things with furry hoods and too many toggles. Ladies' section, Men's section. Actually [Tangent alert] while I'm on the topic, small men - how do you find coats? I tried those things on and they're huge. I'm not tiny, and some of you are, but the smallest possible men's coats are freaking tents. If it's some sort of I'm-a-big-manly-man-and-I'm-so-manly-I-couldn't-possibly-be-tiny thing the men's outerwear industry is trying to do, tell them to stop it, please [End Tangent]. In the end I gave up, decisively resolved to just wear lots of jumpers and get cold till Spring comes round and I can stop worrying about it, and left. I might have bought a dress, but that doesn't count.

Then I went to Sainsbury's ('cos it's closest to my house and I quite like orange. I don't know if I'm posh enough to openly shop there) to buy food, and found a coat, and decisively decided to buy it. So the story ends in a really boring way with me giving in to the world, and buying a coat. But it's got toggles and big pockets for people to sneak sweeties into (cough, cough), so the world is probably a good place. Tomorrow I will wear it and go and watch fireworks without freezing off any of my extremities, which I should be thankful for. 

This weekend I will get on a plane on my own for possibly the first time. Possibly. I can't remember every flying without company, and I can't ask my friends if they ever remember not-flying with me, because that's not how logic works. Either way, I will be doing it with the sort of budget airline hand-luggage that will definitely not include this laptop, so whether or not you get a blog post next week will remain to be seen. I leave you with a picture of me being sick and pathetic, as a warning about the consequences of burning your toast if you work at a swimming pool. 

That would be moisturiser, by way of sticking my face back on again, after the constant nose-blowing had made it fall off.