Episode 11 - Reclaim

Everything I need for the next four days is in the overhead locker, directly above my seat, where I can see it.

I was not always this man. I became him the way most people become careful, which is by repeated and humiliating experience. My luggage has been lost or delayed in at least three countries. I say at least three because there are episodes I have chosen not to count, on the principle that a bag which turns up at the hotel at two in the morning, smelling faintly of another airport, has technically not been lost. It has merely had an evening out.

There is one rule I have never broken. The papers do not go in the hold. Ever. A barrister can, in extremis, borrow a suit. He cannot borrow a bundle. Every case I have ever carried has travelled within arm’s reach, under the seat in front, and has never once failed to arrive.

My trousers have not been so lucky.

Over the years the hold has taken suits, shoes and, on one occasion I still think about, my wig. A barrister’s wig is horsehair, handmade, kept in a tin, and costs roughly what a reasonable person would spend on a second-hand car. It is not a thing you can replace at a department store in an unfamiliar city. I like to imagine it being opened at a customs table somewhere, by an officer who lifts the lid, looks for a long moment at the small grey animal inside, and closes it again without a word.

The truly galling part is not the loss. It is the itinerary. My luggage has been to more exotic places than I was travelling to. I have flown somewhere entirely sensible on business while my suitcase went somewhere I have always wanted to go, at the airline’s expense, without me. In Amélie, she steals her father’s garden gnome and has it photographed in front of the great monuments of the world, to persuade him that it is possible to leave. My bags have done the same thing, minus the photographs. They have simply gone, had a far better time than I was having, and come back days later with the faintly smug air of a colleague returning from a long weekend.

Short-haul Europe is where most of the damage is done.

If you have ever had to hop around the continent for work, you will know the game. Three cities in two days, with connections in Munich or Frankfurt or Vienna that look perfectly achievable on the booking screen. Airports publish something called a minimum connection time, which is the shortest period in which a passenger and his bag can in theory be moved from one aircraft to another. It is a theory in the way that string theory is a theory. The passenger, running, generally makes it. The bag, which cannot run, generally does not.

It is a lottery. More precisely, it is Russian roulette with your general appearance. You land, you go to the carousel, and you find out whether you will be meeting the client tomorrow as yourself, or as a man who is visibly wearing yesterday.

The carousel has its own liturgy, and I know every part of it. The early bags come out, and you are calm. A pushchair comes out, then a set of golf clubs, then a box tied with string, and you remain reasonable. The crowd thins. The same bag goes round three times, unclaimed, black, medium, on wheels, exactly like yours and not yours. Then the belt stops, with a small mechanical shrug, and you are left standing in an empty hall with a handful of other people who have just worked out the same thing at the same moment and are pretending they have not.

Then the desk. The form. The description of the bag, which is always black, medium, on wheels, which is to say every bag ever made. The reference number, written by hand. And the overnight kit: a toothbrush, a comb, a sachet of something, and a T-shirt in a single universal size, so large that the airline’s logo on the front can be read from the departure board.

The airline will tell you the bag is delayed. Delayed is a professional word, and I recognise professional words. It means we do not know where it is, but we would prefer not to say so. The Montreal Convention, which governs these things, allows the bag to be treated as lost after twenty-one days. Compensation is capped and calculated in Special Drawing Rights, a currency nobody has ever held, spent, or seen. I have read the provisions many times. I have no intention of ever relying on them, because I have met the people who would be deciding the claim, and they were at the desk with the T-shirts.

As a frequent traveller, Golden Ticket with British Airways, Senator with Star Alliance, Platinum with Emirates, they try harder and slightly quicker and slightly more sympathetically.  But the end result is largely the same.

So, I converted. Carry-on only, every trip, whatever the length.

It is a discipline, and like the other disciplines in my life, I came to it late and under protest. One suit, worn. One spare, rolled rather than folded, which I am told by people who know about these things is the correct method and which I have taken on trust. One pair of shoes. Shirts calculated to the day. Toiletries in the regulation hundred millilitres, which I now buy in miniature with the solemnity of a man stocking a nuclear bunker.

It does not end the irritation. It merely moves it, from the carousel to the cabin.

The carry-on traveller lives and dies by the overhead locker, and the overhead locker is a shared resource administered by the worst people on the aircraft. There is the man who puts his coat in it, flat, on its own, taking the space of two bags, as though it were a fur being laid out for a viewing. There is the man who puts his case in sideways. And there is the man in row thirty who boards early and stows his bag above row three, so that he can walk the length of the aircraft and back again at the other end, against the flow, with the calm of someone who has never once been inconvenienced by anything in his life

I have views about all three. I keep them, for the most part, to myself. My face, I am told, does not.

But I will admit the reward, because it is the only part of air travel that has ever made me feel superior to anyone. You land. You stand. You take your bag down from directly above your head. And you walk straight past the carousel, past the people gathering in hope around a belt that has not yet started moving, and out through the doors into whatever city it is, while they wait, and they hope.

I do not look back. That would be unkind. I do, sometimes, glance.

Everything else came home eventually. The suits, the shoes, all of it, turning up days later at the hotel with no explanation and no apology, like a teenager after a party.

The wig did not.

I think about it more than is healthy. Somewhere in the world there is a man walking around in a barrister’s wig that was never made for him. It was made for my head, and it has spent twenty-odd years settling into the shape of it. On his it will sit at a slight angle, too small or too large, giving him the air of a man who has wandered out of a costume drama and into the wrong century. I picture him at a wedding. I picture him at a fancy-dress party, as a judge. I picture him, in my darker moments, appearing somewhere as counsel, and doing rather well.

If anyone sees him, I would like it back. I will not be pressing charges. I will, however, want to know where it has been.

They’re boarding. Everything I need is above seat 2A, where I can see it. More from the next one.