LESSONS IN MAN-HANDLING A SUITCASE
After several decades of heavy lifting and emotional baggage handling, this frequent flyer is now reborn as suitcase roller. It's wheelie not going so well.
For decades I was an over emotional baggage handler.
At airports in Japan, Australia, America and China, I struggled with overstuffed, arm-stretching holdalls and duffels. I long-hauled cross-bodied messengers and porters. I bore the weight of burdensome, back-breaking rucksacks.
I did this because I considered lugging more masculine, stylish and ‘well travelled’ than dragging. Then, quite suddenly, a few months ago, whilst making the interminable, Gatwick North to South terminal transfer yet again, lactic acid in my limbs burning and tired, stretched muscles aching as the rest of the world free-wheeled past me with a collectively smug whoosh, I decided that I’d finally had enough with the carry-on comedy. After years of mule-like resistance and macho refusal, I would join the cabin classes and become a roller.
My ride of choice? Instead of Rimowa, TUMI or Zero Halliburton I went for - pretty much on looks alone, I’m dead shallow like that - the Peli Case. An international airlines-approved, pro photographers’ favourite with a butch utility, military-grade, bomb proof box manufactured to rigorous overhead locker proportions. Two wheels on the back. Pack and roll, baby.
But not really. Transitioning from lifting to dragging hasn’t been quite as smooth as I thought it would be. A drag, even. Certainly, the wheels take the strain off and conserve energy, but the wheelie case’s architecture and limited speed (tested to the limit during a tight train to train, inter-platform dash from Chur train to St Moritz connection recently) also conspire to slow me down, make me less nimble at the stressy, flash points of security, embarkation and overhead stowage.
On my Peli case’s first couple of flights there were even times when I was nostalgic for a soft and pliable, fully manoeuvrable holdall. Something I could pick up and run with.
Maybe this is why I was so resistant to wheelying in the first place? Or perhaps it was a deeply ingrained macho thing? I remember once reading a “Man Up” column, at least a decade ago, in GQ, by the writer Victoria Coren, who confirmed my suspicions.
“A wheelie suitcase is terribly convenient, but will always make you look a bit like a stewardess,” said Victoria Coren. “If you want a girl to go all dizzy at your masculine appeal, lift a case up by the handles.” For some reason this stuck with me.
By this time, well into the 2010s, the wheelie revolution was already in full swing. Albeit some 40 years after we first put a man on the moon. Further research proves that the perceived image of the wheeled suitcase (yes - harboured by idiotic males like your writer) had long hindered its commercial success around the world.
You see, us men could actually have been happily wheeling our suitcases around the airport concourses and railway stations as far back as the 1950s. That’s when the earliest iterations of the castered valise first appeared. By the 1970s the technology was all in place - smooth-running urethane wheels with sealed bearings borrowed from new fangled skateboards, aero-engineered, telescopic handles that popped in and out of the lightweight, polycarbonate casings with the sleek efficiency of an automatic weapon. What we were waiting for, fellas?
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