Your coat is ruining your night out

Going out in winter is stressful for its own good, and your coat is exclusively to blame.

For you must choose from a depressing menu of three options when you go out in winter: you can wear your coat and ruin it, you can check in your coat and lose it, or you can leave your coat at home and die without it.

Option one: You wear your coat all night.

You force your way through people on the dancefloor in your leather jacket like you’re being squeezed out of a Frube, sweating like a roast-in-the-bag chicken. By the time you leave, your sheepskin will be so encrusted with double vodka coke that it’ll permanently stick to the hanger when you take it off. This is light camel, guys. Do you know how much that costs to dry clean?

Option two: You check the coat in.

After queuing for forty minutes, you spend so much of your night worrying about what the greasy vagabonds in the cloakroom are doing with your Canada Goose that you don’t even bother dancing. You leave earlier than planned and spend a further forty minutes in the queue, only to realise you’ve lost your ticket and they’ve “lost” your coat. It’s like the poor souls of Welly Ball taught you nothing.

Option three: You don’t take a coat.

You’re only going to be outside between the taxi and the club anyway, right? You end up walking because you can’t get an Uber, and you’re forced to wait outside before getting in for what seems like an eternity. By the time you’re dragged to the smoking area for the fifth time, you’re pretty sure you’ll never regain feeling in at least three of your fingers. You’ll spend the next week bedridden with what you can only assume is hypothermia, and then you’ll do it all again.

We’ll spend February fretting and fussing over whether to wear it, check it or leave it, but that’s the problem: there is no correct answer. No matter which of the three options you decide, you’ve been dealt a really shit hand.

It’s a problem you won’t have in summer, and it’s so petty your friends will laugh in your face if you admit to how much it gets you down – but that doesn’t make it go away. The coat dilemma is real, and it’s jeopardising your winter nights out. The only sensible option is to stay inside until summer.