I’m in February’s Arena magazine in this coat by Aquascutum. The whole experience was utterly surreal, by the way, and the picture they took for the item – about new talent for 2009 – was utterly gorgeous. (Hence also a little bit untruthful, because much as I like to believe otherwise, I am not, in fact, model pretty.)

It’s also the first time I’ve had your real and actual fun being photographed, and part of that – aside from the photographer and the wardrobe & make-up folks just being amazingly nice – was teh awesome-ness of the coat I was wearing. Black, double-breasted, little woolly bit around the collar. The thing was somewhere between The Matrix and Torchwood. It was, needless to say, mountainously expensive, and while I love fine things in general and gorgeous clothes and Italian red wine in particular, I don’t love them enough to pay a couple of grand for a coat. Apart from anything else, I tend to feel that that’s too much money to spend on anything which doesn’t involve a plinth, a microprocessor, an engine, or a number of bathrooms.

However… with an hour to kill in Regent Street the other day, and Mrs Harkaway dressed to the nines for some international world-savingness, I thought we might just pop in so I could fantasize about owning a garment like this and in the process show my beloved that I am indeed as delicious as the soft-cheeked, sorrowful-eyelashed bloke in the magazine. Because I kid you not, they made me look as good as I ever have in a picture.

So here’s the odd thing: there is no such coat. It does not exist. I don’t mean they’d sold out, I mean that, although there is a very similar coat, as far as I can tell, the one with the collar cannot be had for love nor money. Without it, the coat goes from rock ‘n’ roll to sedately stylish in the blink of a gnat’s eye. It looks like a very expensive, very select coat which you’d expect to see on a very senior solicitor at a public trial. Or maybe it looks like the kind of thing very attractive, very rich, very young men wear to very stylish parties.

What it isn’t, though, is the garment I had in my hands, in which I looked… well. Pretty good.

Thus: the Gone-Away Coat.