Wet wool

A wool coat draped over the back of a café chair, dripping slightly. The smell of having walked in from the rain. It is one of the better smells.

You take the coat off. You hang it on the brass hook or, if there isn't one, on the back of your own chair. You sit. You order the second flat white of the morning. The coat dries slowly through the next hour. By the time you leave it smells of the wool it was made from, faintly, in a way the cheap things never do.

A garment that smells of wet wool when it dries is a garment made of wool. That is how you can tell. The cheap things smell of nothing.

We make heavy clothes, partly, because of this.