Fake packing (part one in a series)

Today I'm doing some trip practise, considering I will be taking off in exactly three weeks and a few hours. If previous trips are anything to go by, I predict that in three weeks I will be sitting on my bed breathing into a brown paper bag, paralysed with fear and all my shit strewn about the place. My state of panic will be exacerbated by the fact that the items listed in my carefully considered Trip Packing Spreadsheet do not in any way fit inside a standard piece of luggage.

So today I did some fake packing -- practise. Not only did I practise squeezing these items into my hand luggage, this is also a practice blog post from the iPad/iPhone camera combo. So far, I have not required the services of a brown paper bag. I also noted, happily, that the contents of my hand luggage, namely:

• 1 x James Pringle vintage woollen lap blanket
• 1 x iPad 
• 1 x Siri Hustvedt novel 
• 1 x camera 
• 1 x posh moisuturiser
• 1 x passport (which contains murderous internal photograph displaying each of 27 chins to their best potential) 

... fits quite happily into my hand luggage bag. Phew. 

Eagle-eyed readers of Chops Abroad may note that the chosen reading material is a novel called The Summer Without Men*, by my favourite writer Siri Hustvedt. It has taken a considerable amount of uncharacteristic self-discipline to keep this one on my shelf for the last few months, as I usually like to devour Mrs Paul Auster's work within minutes of publication. I think it is a partially amusing, topical choice of book, as I am enjoying (for better or worse) a gap year from man-hunting. And I'm spending two weeks in France with six other women, a week in Berlin with another woman, and as for the conference I'm attending... well, let's just say I work in a vagina-centric industry. So it may well turn out to be The Summer Without Men for me. And I imagine that reading a book like this on a plane is hardly going to make any handsome foreign strangers think 'Gee, what a literary megababe. I bet she's super-approachable.' 

As you were. 

*I note that the Amazon user reviews give this book an average rating of 3 out of a possible 5 stars. Yeah, well, haters gonna. I'm reserving judgement until when I'm halfway between here and Doha airport with nothing else to read but the instructions on how to use my vom bag effectively.