Well, perhaps not a kitten, maybe a lion since these mittens are about as big as oven glove mitts. Yes, finally after two and a bit winters of having to cope with freezing hands and ineffective layering of individually ineffective gloves, I’ve been able to splash out a whole £15 (including P&P!) on some German Army Issue Mittens. That’s far more in my price range than any of the other options. So far, so good, although I haven’t had any properly cold weather (minus double-digit degrees Celcius - it’s only been minus a few degrees) yet to know if they’ll really work as I hope: being super huge there is plenty of scope for wearing insulated gloves under them, using layers of newspaper around my fingers or actually sticking hand warmers inside them; My fingers are on the skeletal side of things (no fat, look dead at the best of times) so I suspect my glove insulation requirements are greater than most people. If I was just wearing them on their own and not for cycling then a medium size would have been a better fit, but the large size also has the advantage that the thumbs are plenty long enough for cycling. It’s too early to tell on the dryness front: they’ve been in 19 miles of light rain, but not heavy rain yet - however, I’d be very surprised if they are worse than my supposedly waterproof gloves (they only way I can make those actually waterpoof is by wearing marigolds under them).
And, yes, as I expected I can change gears with them, it’s just a bit fiddly, especially given their size - but I’ll happily take fiddly over cold fingers.