Little need for a winter coat?

Yesterday I was having lunch with a friend and we  both remarked on how warm it was for Halloween.  I said it was strange but years ago when I was young I remember how we always had a winter coat of sorts and how these days there seems to be little need for one.  I bought a beautiful cobalt blue one with a fur collar two years ago.  I think I've only worn it less than a handful of times.

Back in the sixties and seventies, the winters got so cold that the miniature milk bottles froze in their crates at school.  Us school children couldn't even pierce the foil tops with our straws.  The teacher used to defrost the bottles near the radiator.

Many a time we were sent home from school when the boiler broke down or it snowed and snowed and snowed as if God was shaking his feather mattress above us.  I loved those times of going home and playing outside in the snow with our sleighs.  It brought a rose bloom to our cheeks and we came home chilled to the bone ready to thaw out by the fireside.  I once built a snowman that lasted almost a whole week in my grandmother's garden until my brother knocked its head off.  I was devastated.  My great grandmother who was in her mid eighties then and slightly senile, was living with my gran and I distinctly remember her shouting about my brother, "Tell him I'll knock his head off for him!"

My brother had a habit of destroying things I made.  I once remember him trampling over a Sindy Kitchen I'd put together following instructions from Lesley Judd on Blue Peter using a cardboard box and sticky back plastic.  But that's another story!

To get back to this one, I think I enjoyed wearing my winter coats and polo neck sweaters.  I loved it when the temperatures were more extreme: warm in summer and cold in winter.  Sometimes it got so cold that there was ice on the inside of the windows, we took water bottles to bed [after all we had no central heating and only one coal fire to heat the whole house], we even had to make do with coats on the bed as extra bedding.  Thank goodness we had those winter coats then.

Today there's an article in the Daily Mail about the fact people aren't buying winter coats this year and they're on sale at great knock down prices.

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2816485/Get-winter-wardrobe-HALF-PRICE-Balmy-weather-s-left-stores-unsold-winter-outfits-cash-just-gets-cold.html

So bag yourself a bargain if you can...but I can't guarantee you'll get to wear it much this winter!