The Blue Coat

The most common question put to me by friends and tourists alike is not about the quality of the mackerel (excellent), nor about my years at sea (endless, damp, unprofitable). It is always: ‘Where did you get that blue coat?’ So, I’ve put together - for my friend Alasdair Grey - three answers.

The Official Version: Awarded by the Admiralty in recognition of ‘valour under maritime duress.’ [Report No. 17, Admiralty Archive, 1923, now missing*] The medals rusted away, but the coat endured, which suggests it was made of sterner stuff than empire.

The Local Version: Won in a card game against a fishmonger’s nephew who styled himself ‘Neptune’s heir.’ [See Fig. 1 for an artist’s impression of the game, in which five haddocks sit in judgment.] The nephew lost, I gained, Brighton gained a coat.

The Domestic Version: My late wife stitched it from curtains ‘borrowed’ from the Theatre Royal. She swore the colour was ‘ocean blue’. I called it ‘constable drowned’. Either way, she was right that it lasted longer than the marriage.

Notes on Structure and Material

Buttons: variable. Brass to visitors, barnacle to locals, invisible to those too drunk to notice.

Lining: allegedly woven from kelp fibres. Tastes faintly of iodine.

Weight: increases each year, suggesting the coat is absorbing stories, salt, and disbelief in equal measure.**

In conclusion, the coat has no single origin. It is sewn from stories, stitched with memory, dyed in Brighton rain. When you ask me how I got it, I answer truthfully: by accident, by invention, and by being asked the question often enough that the coat itself began to exist.

* A Brighton Archive librarian insists there is no such report. The same librarian owns a suspiciously similar blue coat.

** A scientific study has been proposed but abandoned due to the coat’s refusal to leave its wearer.