The Doolin trip last week left the bag sitting in the hall for two days before I got around to emptying it. Normally I’d put it away the same evening, but I’d come back tired and the weather had turned and there was a fire to light. It sat there by the door and I stepped over it each morning, which felt slightly pathetic but also fine.
And then I started repacking it in my head, the way I always do after a trip – what had been useful, what I’d carried for four days and not opened once. I’ve been doing this mentally for long enough now that I should probably write it down. So here it is.
The bag itself
A medium holdall, dark navy, soft-sided, no wheels. I’ve had it eight or nine years. It fits in the overhead on a small plane if it comes to that, it sits in the footwell of the Yaris without drama, and it doesn’t have enough compartments that I spend ten minutes trying to remember which zip I used. I’ve watched guests at the B&B arrive with enormous rigid suitcases on wheels for two-night stays, hauling them over the threshold, the wheels catching on the mat, apologising to the case as much as to me. A soft bag collapses when it’s half empty. That alone is worth something.
I don’t think much about luggage as a category. But the bag being right means I don’t think about it at all after I’ve packed, which is the outcome I’m after.
What goes in first
The heavy things at the bottom: any books I’m bringing, charger, washbag. The washbag is small, an old flowery thing Bríd gave me years ago that I keep meaning to replace and haven’t. Everything in it is a small-sized version of something I already own. I bought a travel-sized tube of whatever and then refilled it, which sounds more organised than it actually was.
I always bring a book I’m halfway through and one I haven’t started, on the theory that I might finish the first one – I rarely do. I was two-thirds through that novel from the Schull bookshop when I went to Dingle in November, and I was still two-thirds through it when I came home. Something about being away makes me read more slowly, not less, which is probably not what you’d expect. The Schull book got finished in December, in the end. In the armchair by the fire, not on any trip.
Layering is the other thing. I grew up here; I know how February works on this peninsula. You need a layer you can take off and a layer underneath that’s enough on its own, and you need to actually do this and not just own the clothing. A base layer, something warm over that, a waterproof on top. Wool socks. Two pairs is right. Three if you’re going anywhere wet – Doolin, anything coastal. That trip, I had two pairs and needed three. My own fault.
What she always forgets
A plug adapter if I’m staying somewhere with European sockets. A lip balm. A second pen – I always bring one pen and then it runs out or I lose it, every time. Paracetamol: I have it at home, I never think to transfer it, and then I end up paying over the odds in a small-town pharmacy. This is something I have done in Dingle, in Kenmare, in Schull, and once mortifyingly in Doolin last week when I woke up with a headache and had to ask at the front desk at eight in the morning like I was seventeen.
I always bring a small notebook, which is good, and I always forget to leave space at the back for things I need to remember, which is less good. There are three or four notes I made in Doolin that I now can’t fully decode, including what looks like either a book title or a pub name, written in handwriting that got progressively worse across the four days.
What she never brings
This is the part I learnt from the B&B years more than from anywhere else. Guests would arrive with things they’d clearly packed in case of a situation that wasn’t going to arise. Full-sized hairdryers. Multiple shoes for every variation of weather. One woman arrived with a small steamer for her clothes. For a long weekend in Kerry in October. I admired it, in a way – she’d thought it through. But I could see the weight of the bag in her face when she carried it upstairs.
I never bring anything I’d have to fold carefully. If something needs to be ironed to look right, I don’t bring it on a short trip. This removes an entire category of packing anxiety.
I don’t bring food any more, bar one emergency piece of chocolate that I’ve always eaten by the motorway. I used to bring a small bag of tea bags – Barry’s, obviously – because I don’t trust what you get in rooms, and I’m not wrong not to trust it. But I’ve stopped even that now. I’ll make do. If I can’t get a decent cup of tea for four days, that’s something I’ll survive.
The letters I wrote in Kenmare in October are still on the windowsill. I checked before Doolin, in case I’d thought to bring them, and they were still there, which tells you everything about my attitude to anything that doesn’t fit neatly in the bag.
I packed in twenty minutes before Doolin. Drove out of here by half eight with the bag in the back and only had to turn around once, for my phone charger, which was still in the kitchen press where I’d left it the night before.
The bag is away now, finally. Sitting in the back of the wardrobe until the next time.