You’d have thought I’d have cracked it by now. After three years as a fashion editor, someone who spends about four months a year on the road, in every kind of climate and condition, I should be a packing ninja: the kind of person who can throw together a carry-on case to cover every occasion without a moment’s hesitation.
And yet. Still, I fail to pack well. Work or play I can’t quite get it right. On arrival, I find myself with shoes that have become strangely ill-fitting in transit and must be abandoned, throwing every outfit planned around them out of kilter. I bring too many white T-shirts, or too few, or things that need ironing after 10 minutes wear. I pack ribbed knitted tops without remembering to bring the specific undergarment required to make them fall flatteringly. I am cursed to forget fundamentally important items, like sleep wear, or toothpaste, or the hair unguent that daily saves me from looking like a Brian May tribute act.
Rather than packing the things I might need, I find myself weighed down with an excess of options that all seem quite useless on arrival. Travel brings out my worst fantasist tendency to prepare for the life I imagine I lead rather than the one I actually do. The life in which I need to walk further than 20 steps a day, and require some comfortable clothes. Instead, I pack piles of cripplingly high heels and strangely directional daywear that makes me feel weird and self-conscious. Despite my obsessive study of the weather in the run-up to a trip, I seem incapable of bringing clothes that quite correspond to the climate I will arrive in: for Paris couture week, under sweltering skies, I packed a heavy linen trenchcoat and a tweed jacket. I went to Galway, in the rain-sodden west of Ireland, without a waterproof.