It looks like the season you are actually in

This is what stopped me on the sand. The Cora has wide woven stripes running right around it, and mine goes yellow, tan, white and yellow again. The Sasha is a run of thin stripes in navy, sky blue, coral, green and raspberry. The boutique says stripes like these lift even the simplest outfit, and I can report that they lift a white shirt I have owned since the Olympics. For forty years my bag has been the darkest thing on me from November to March. I never noticed until I stood next to somebody whose bag was not.

The Cora on the verandah at Huskisson. Four stripes, and I have counted.

It is light before you have put anything in it

My black bag weighed something standing empty. All that hardware. By the end of a warm day I knew all about it, and in a car park in January the clasp was hot enough to brand cattle. The boutique says the woven body of the Cora stays light on the shoulder for long days out, and calls the Sasha light and easy, and both of those match my experience. I carried the Cora all through a warm Saturday and forgot I had it, which I have never been able to say of a handbag, and I put it down to the same thing Trish did, which is that there is simply less bag.

The Sasha by the water at Huskisson, going to get the fish and chips, with no fuss at all.

The Cora takes the whole day, and you can see into it

The top is wide and curved and open, and that is the whole idea of it. The boutique says it is easy to drop in towels, sun cream and a good book, and I can add a hat, a water bottle and the lead Banjo refuses to walk on. I can see everything I own at a glance, which after forty years of digging is a novelty. I will say plainly that it is open at the top, so my purse goes down in the middle under the towel. I am sixty-four and I have spent enough of my life fighting with clasps.

The Sasha takes the evening, and nothing more

This is where Trish had been cleverer than me. You cannot take a beach bag to dinner, and I was never going to take the black one again. The Sasha is the smaller of the two, softly curved, and the boutique says it holds your phone, purse, sunglasses and keys without feeling bulky. That is what I carry, and that is what it holds. It sits under the arm, and when you are at the fish and chip shop with both hands full, it stays there. Graham looked up from the cricket and asked whether it was new, which in forty years of marriage is a first for a bag.

The Sasha on the outside table. Mine has not stopped being looked at.

The finishing is what makes it a bag and not a basket

I looked closely, because a woven bag can go wrong very quickly and end up in the laundry. The Cora has two long tan handles, stitched along the edges, that finish in neat stitched tabs on the top stripe, and they sit nicely on the shoulder. The Sasha has brown trim all along the top edge that matches its strap, silver hooks at each end of the strap, and a silver star charm that the boutique describes as playful and that Jenny from over the road described as a bit much, right before she asked to hold it. Thirty years on a front desk taught me you can tell how a thing was finished by the edges.

The afternoon the second one arrived. I laid them out next to each other to see if I had gone mad.

You get to choose, and you do not have to be brave

The Cora comes in four colourways: my yellow and white, soft browns, pink and green, and a black and white one for women not yet ready to let go. The Sasha comes in the bright stripe or in a calm natural beige. The collection itself has twenty-seven bags in it, and I lost an evening to them while Graham watched the golf. The black handbag has gone up on the top shelf with the cardigans, where it can come down in June. Jenny from over the road, who has never paid me a compliment in her life, looked at the Cora and said I looked as if I had gone on holiday and forgotten to come back.

The hooks by the door in Epping, where the black one used to live twelve months of the year.