The Things I Carry With Me

It was the day that I had to buy a suitcase in Belgium that I began to believe I figured it all out.

I woke up in London that morning at the end of a week-long trip from Berlin and through Paris. It had been a long time since I had been back in the UK and I had taken the opportunity, on the back of the Reinsurance News conference I was asked to attend, to spend a few days catching up with editors and friends past and present.

A week’s trip is a long one and I had packed most of what I had within a large red collapsible holdall, with the rest—laptop, cables, Kindle—stuffed into a backpack. It was a decision that, even when I was making it, I knew was not a wise one; I had been in Perugia earlier in the year for the International Journalism Festival and an overstuffed backpack worn for too long and too awkwardly had left me in agony with a suspected slipped disc. But a rolling suitcase, I always felt, was the preserve of the middle-aged.

I justified the unwise decision to take a holdall rather than a rolling suitcase because of the distances involved. It is a hop, skip, and jump from my home to Berlin Hauptbahnhof, a short ride from Gare Du Nord to my hotel in Paris, and similar from St. Pancras station in London to my room there.

The plan had worked fairly well. Once I was in London, I emptied my holdall and hung everything in my wardrobe. My back ached and twinged a little during those days, but it was something that a few, minor painkillers took care of.

The problem was in coming back. I intended to go from London to Berlin in one day. I would take the Eurostar to Brussels, then a train to Cologne where I would switch for an ICE to Berlin. It would take nine hours, there would be a dining car, and I would be home in the late afternoon.

That was until something failed at Cologne and the repercussions of that worked their way backwards along my route. I took the train to Brussels and hauled off my holdall onto the platform, my back beginning to creak beneath its weight.

The pain was high up on my back, about two thirds of the way to the top. That is where it always is. When there is considerable weight on a shoulder or both shoulders, e.g. carrying an overpacked large red collapsible holdall, I can feel it in the disc, almost tense as if something is about to snap.

I had that feeling by the time I was in Brussels. But my train to Cologne was cancelled. I took an advised train to Lieges. There, I was told that I had to go to Verviers and, from there, to Aachen. It was, apparently, in God’s hands after that.

It was raining in Lieges, and the first train out of there was full so I walked into the town and found a store that sold suitcases and bought one, then went and sat in a McDonald’s and transferred everything from the holdall and half of what was in the backpack into it. I then folded down the holdall and used its own strap to tie it to the case. I felt somewhat bad for the holdall, but relieved for myself.

I went back to the station, then on to Aachen. I took a train from there to Dusseldorf, and then finally managed to find an ICE back to Berlin. The whole trip, instead of nine hours, took fourteen. At least there was a dining car.

As I write this, I am travelling to Goeppingen, near Stuttgart. The idea was to spend some time with Firat Arslan, former WBA cruiserweight champion, before his fight. Firat, a lovely man, said I should come to the weigh-in before we went together to dinner. That meant coming on the Friday and staying for two nights.

Goeppingen is a long way from Berlin and the train journey should take around six-and-a-half hours. I left home at five in the morning to take a train scheduled an hour later. I was supposed to arrive at Nuremberg at nine, wait forty-five minutes for a connection to Schwabisches Gmund, then take a bus.

But the train stopped on the outskirts of Berlin for an hour and then it stopped for another hour at Erfurt. No one explained why. And by the time it did get into Nuremberg, it was three hours behind schedule and I knew I would miss the weigh-in and my dinner with Firat.

Looking around me as I write this, I see all the things that I carry always with me when I travel, their presence a knowledge gleaned first-hand through mistakes. I have my laptop on which I am writing, along with a carefully curated selection of wires and cables in their own Thule pouch, along with a travel-sized mouse, a portable battery, and a pad. I have pens (two, one of them spare) and a notebook. My new phone pulls extra duties for me when I travel as recorder, camera, and navigator.

I’m wearing hiking trainers, comfortable but neat enough to wear anywhere. Mountain biking trousers, too, for the same reason.

My coat is a three-in-one that I take with me no matter the weather. That was one of the most-recent lessons I learned. I went to Perugia in April with only a small and light down jacket that I thought would be enough, but the city saw a cold snap rarely experienced in April. I was chilled that week and rightfully so. I marked it down as a one-off, but a rainy night in Hamburg a few months later underlined the fact that you should always have a decent coat. A three-in-one adds also the flexibility for multiple iterations from the same garment—a fleece for when it is slightly chilly, a waterproof for when it is slightly chilly and wet, and both for anything colder than that.

It was -6 the next morning in Goeppingen. My back, thankfully, was well. I had taken my last painkiller nearly twenty-four hours before and in taking the bus to here, twisted myself at some point along rough roads, took hold of a metal bar, and felt a rapid series of clicks and cracks up my spine. A night’s sleep and all the pain and tension had gone.

Somehow, despite the delays and the pain and the missed connections and the lost interview and the lateness of the arrival, I had gotten to Goeppingen in one piece.

Everything had fallen into place.

This story has also been posted to Medium.