A letter from a reader

Fifty years of handbags and I have never once written to a shop about one. This is the exception

Six things the Alina gets right that everyday handbags get wrong, from a woman who does not review handbags.

Let me be plain about who is talking. I am Pat, I am 69, I live in Scarborough, the one by the beach and not the English one, and I have carried a handbag every day for fifty years without once writing to a shop about one. What I have done is wear out a lifetime of them. Big ones that swallowed my keys. Small smart ones that held a lipstick and a folded tissue. And one very sensible black one that I carried for eleven years out of pure stubbornness.

So this is not a review. It is a woman who was wrong about a handbag, saying so.

I first saw it at the bowls club. Every Wednesday there is a woman called Lorraine who never puts her bag down. Not on the bench, not on the bar, not on the chair beside her. It sits across her body the whole afternoon, and when her grandson rang halfway through the second end she had her phone out of the front pocket and answered it before I had found my own glasses.

I assumed it was expensive. One of those shops in the city where they bring you a glass of water while you decide. So one afternoon over the scones I asked her, plainly. She laughed, and said she had been waiting weeks for somebody to ask.

Pat, you have been digging in that bag since I sat down.

That was Lorraine as well. She was not wrong.

It is called the Alina, from Perth Boutique, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly making the ordinary things a bit lovelier for a few years now. I ordered the caramel fully expecting to send it back, because I had been let down by enough handbags to know how it goes. Instead I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote them a letter. They asked if they could put it up for other women to read, and I said yes, on the condition I could be completely honest in it.

Here are the six things, laid out plainly.

One. It looks like a decision, not a compromise.

The shops give a woman my age two choices. The great big shopper, which is practical in the way a bin bag is practical. Or the small smart one, which looks lovely and holds nothing.

The Alina is neither. It has a gently curved top, neat squared stitching across the front and a little silver kangaroo on it that I have grown unreasonably fond of. It looks like a bag somebody thought about. It does not look like it was made for somebody half my age, and it does not look like I have given up either.

Two. The phone lives in the front pocket.

There is a zipped pocket on the front that sits exactly where your hand falls, and that is where my phone goes now, and nowhere else.

I did not realise how many calls I had been missing until I stopped missing them. My daughter has stopped asking whether I have changed my number.

Three. Everything has its own place.

Inside it is divided, rather than one enormous cave. The purse stands where the purse stands. The keys go in the same corner every time. My glasses have a home instead of a hiding place.

I used to think my problem was space, so every time a bag drove me mad I bought a bigger one, and the bigger one was worse. It was never about the size. It was about whether things had somewhere to live.

Four. Both hands are free.

It goes across the body on an adjustable strap, so it sits where I want it rather than where it lands. At the bowls club it stays put through a whole afternoon. At the shops it stays out of the way of the trolley. I have not hitched a strap back up my shoulder once, which I had not realised I had been doing all day, every day, for years.

Five. It holds a whole day and still feels light.

It is about 23 centimetres across, 21 high and 10 deep. Purse, phone, keys, glasses, a cardigan for when the sea breeze comes in, and my bowls card all go in, and it still keeps its shape. It is structured enough to stand up on the bench and light enough that I forget I have it on.

Six. It looks better the more you carry it.

The finish is a hard-wearing vegan leather that gains a bit of depth and character as it goes, rather than scuffing and looking tired by the second month like the last three I owned. The caramel goes with practically everything I wear, from the bowls whites to my good navy for church. They do a black as well, if caramel is a step too far for you.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Alina is $56.99. It was $199.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because you can walk into any department store in the city and pay double that for a bag that is one big cave with a name on the front. There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no middleman taking a cut, and they have a sale on at the moment to make room for the new season stock.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. About four hundred of them, from women who found it before I did. That was what finally talked me into it.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat on the bench at the club with a pot of tea between us, this is what I would say.

If your handbag has turned into a search party every time the phone rings, not because you like it but because that seemed to be all the shops had, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a handbag will change your life. It will not. But there is something in answering the phone on the second ring, with your purse already in its place and both hands free, that I had quietly given up on. I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the new season stock is already going. And it is the caramel that goes first, which I found out because Lorraine's sister had to wait a week for hers.

I have not tipped a handbag out on the kitchen table since.

Pat