At what point should you admit to yourself that, just possibly, you have a problem. Or, to be more precise, how many winter coats and jackets does the average person actually need to get them through the icy bleakness? Even being generous with the breakdown of warm to cold days in the typical year, and designating five months as being cold enough to require a thick outer layer, we’re only really talking about a hundred and fifty or so days of winter chill.

Being a nerd I have to break the numbers down into a days to coat ratio, which has to be a minimum of ten to enable the cost per wear ratio to take full effect (does anyone else see a “fashion math” pattern emerging here?) So, a hundred and fifty days, ten days of wear per coat, ideally there should be fifteen winter coats and jackets hanging in my closet.

Which provides an answer to my initial question. You should admit you have a problem when you know, with a fair degree of accuracy, that you can justify a total of fifteen examples of a certain item and you actually own (at last count) at least double that.