But will this coat see me out?

I can remember my Nanna buying a new coat and saying with some satisfaction “I think this coat will see me out”. I don’t think she meant out of the front door, I think she meant out of a more permanent door. I was impossibly young at the time and thought it was an embarrassingly morbid thing to say or even think about, and I dismissed it from my mind. But obviously not permanently because here I was, many years later, remembering it as I looked at my winter coat, thinking the same thing. It’s a proper woollen coat, black and white houndstooth check and well made. I bought it several years ago and there’s nothing trendy about it, although I understand that houndstooth is now at the cutting edge of fashion, but I can’t say that I noticed when it wasn’t. And the thought that it might outlast me gives me great pleasure. It’s a real coat for life, unlike those plastic bags that really aren’t. People say you turn into your mother, but I seem to be turning into my grandmother as well. It’s getting very crowded in here, a bit like Princess Diana’s marriage.

My Nanna was born into a large family during the Boer War and lived through two world wars, so she knew a lot about coping on limited resources and wasting nothing. Money was definitely tight, but there is also a sense of achievement in managing on a limited budget and I can imagine that a lifetime’s worth of wear from one coat gave her great pleasure. And maybe it was also the satisfaction of a job well done – she could finally cross all coat-buying off her to-do list.

I suppose it’s inevitable that we grow to resemble our mothers and grandmothers. When I was a child, men played a very small part in bringing up children and it was the women who brought us up. We absorbed their opinions, tastes, prejudices and foibles at a very impressionable age and they are all lurking deep inside us, ready to leap out when we least expect it.

The world has moved on quite a bit since my childhood, but sometimes things travel full circle and my grandmother’s instinct for buying better quality clothes and fewer of them is enjoying a revival, although it’s now been rebranded as Slow Fashion. If I’m honest, although I do applaud the environmental stand on waste, it also fits right in with my natural inclination to make do and mend. What would my Nanna say if she could see me now, darning my socks in the evening? Probably “Why don’t you go out and have a bit of fun?” She did like a good time.