things move around

The woman in the shop tells me that my new laptop bag is made by the people who make Swiss Army knives. She unzips all the compartments and disembowels the bag of its tissue-paper stuffing. “Look, this is for your cellphone” she says, with an encouraging look on her face. I marvel appropriately. At the till, she remembers something else, delves, rummages, and shows me a keyring attached to an interior wall of the bag, sort of like a tonsil. There’s a rotating thing on a stick too, don’t know what that is, and a little shoehorn which plays the theme tune to ‘Ski Sunday’.

The bag is backpack-style. I have an abiding spite for luggage carried other than on the back. I just can’t see a single advantage of handheld luggage. Go on, name one advantage. Yet the hegemony of the suitcase is worse than ever these days. You stand at the baggage reclaim and it’s just hard-shelled suitcase after hard-shelled sodding suitcase. At least, say, 10 years ago the suitcases showed some variation: there were different sizes and styles, hideous tartans and flannels still in circulation. Now all that’s gone. And then amidst all this homogeneity a rucksack tumbles out of the chute and you can see people flinch and recoil at the perversity of it. People get really freaked out by it. But with your luggage on your back you can flick the v’s at the suitcase-dragging clowns as you beat them to taxi rank.

One other thing: girls with rucksacks = hot.