I am a packhorse

When I had reconstructive surgery on my foot, I took stock for the very first time of what I took to work. On crutches, there is a very serious limit to what you can bring in with you, and for the 6 weeks when I was in my surgical boot and taking cabs from home to office and back, I made a very good fist of restricting myself to a small backpack containing the bare essentials. Of course, we are talking FEMALE bare essentials, which in my case included, lunch (economy sized bag of crudites, wheat free sandwich, half fat yogurt and five litres of water), a lipstick, another lipstick in case I wasn't in the mood for the first one, my home phone, my work phone, my front door keys, my side gate key in case I lost my front door keys...you get the picture.

But once out of my surgical boot it was a matter of just a few days before I was back to my old packhorse habits. So yesterday I emptied the entire contents of the two bags I take regularly to work to see what it is I find so important that I cannot leave it behind. And I discovered that it is not that I take a lot of useless clutter with me. It is that I commute like a nomad. I carry essentials with me for every possible variation of the day. And when I look around the tube I can see to my amusement that I'm not the only one. Women across London are all at it. We all appear to be wearing running shoes, so that if our train breaks down in the tunnel we won't ruin our work shoes as we pick our way through the rats and the soot to the next station. We carry food because in these economic times who can afford to buy their lunch from Pret? We carry our gym gear because apparently we can still afford the gym even if we can't afford food. With gym gear comes a complete set of toiletries and make up so that we can emerge from the gym looking as if we spent the last hour in a spa and not in legs, bums 'n' tums. We carry our laptop, because we work 24/7 around our various domestic responsibilities to catch up with our email. Then there are the various mobile phones - the work one, the home one, and the spare one for use if either of the other two break. There are our tea time snacks to stop us going out on a chocolate binge, our IPad, MP3 for listening to motivating music on the last mile of the commute that we will complete on foot, and a host of medication - three different analgesics, emergency hand and face care, reams and reams of tissues, and two different perfumes - one for the office, and a heavier one for if we think we have a hot date that evening. I stare at it all in disbelief. No wonder the ligaments in my foot started snapping from the strain. What my surgeon should have done, isntead of rebuilding my foot the way it used to be, was to have attached a horseshoe to it.