baggage

I came home for Christmas. I saw old friends and shopped and ate and wrapped presents and wore silly hats and ate some more and lounged on the recliner sofas my parents have acquired all of a sudden and drank whisky and introduced my father to whisky and laughed at the stupidest things and was loved more than any human has a right to be.

Tomorrow I'm going home, so tonight I have to pack. Turns out Christmas presents take up quite a lot of space.

I packed and repacked. I transferred things from bag to bag. I called in my little brother to weigh in on the "it is better to have a wheely suitcase, one shoulder bag and one carrier bag, or a wheely suitcase plus two shoulder bags to keep one hand free?" dilemma. I got it just about done and then realised I hadn't packed about nine of my presents, so I took everything out again. I was starting to get backache.

In the end, I came to the snap and surprising decision to abandon my handbag.

My handbag, like all the handbags that came before it, is a monster thing. I've always been of the opinion that if my handbag cannot carry all my wallet-keys-phone essentials plus an umbrella, a compact camera, two reusable shopping bags, a pair of gloves, a bottle of water, a packet of mints, a pair of dance shoes, a fan, two bottles of body spray and a make-up bag, it's got no right to call itself my handbag. I take most of this stuff, except the shoes, everywhere. Just in case. Who knows when you're going to need body spray in two different scents, right?

My dance teacher pointed out to me ages ago that I carry a lot of extra tension in that shoulder. If I go a few days without taking the bag anywhere, it's immediately obvious to me when I pick it up again that it's heavy and uncomfortable and sometimes physically painful to carry. Sometimes I have so much stuff that I end up walking lopsided. I noticed all these things, but decided that I'd just have to live with them. Because I need all that stuff. I need the six pens and the broken bits of another four pens, the handful of loose change, the packets of paracetamol, the hair ties (my hair has been too short to tie back for four months now), the myriad packs of gum, the screwed-up receipts and cinema tickets and bits of paper with my name on (dance debris is not like normal debris), the cocktail stirrers and flowery hair grips and broken sunglasses. It's necessary.

In trying to find a way to get everything back home with me, I realised that the stuff I actually need, the things I use day to day, will fit in a bag the size of an A5 paperback, and it's possible that the emotional security I get from carrying around 10lb worth of mementoes and precautions is maybe not worth permanent shoulder damage. So I took the essentials out, discarded the bag and everything else in it.

I'd like to write about how freeing it is, how nice it feels not to have to take that weight with me everywhere, how much better I feel now. But tomorrow I still have to lug a wheely suitcase and two shoulder bags from west to east, and I have a sense that my shoulders will be feeling substantially worse until I put everything down again at the other end.

Sorry, shoulders. I'm trying.