Handbags at dawn

My long suffering flatmate causes hysterical laughter in the morning. No, not for that reason, she always looks amazing but The Handbag of Doom always puts a smile on my face.

I’m there drinking tea in my fluffy white dressing gown or smug running gear, or whatever, and there she perches on the edge of the sofa looking like one of the more pathetic Furies. Surrounded by female detritus. Looking for unimportant things, like keys.

So today she wrote out a list of what she keeps in her bamboozlebag which inspired me to do likewise, just to show how insanely different we are. We are alike in so many ways but this handbag issue just keeps making giggles bubble up like a glass of Veuve Cliquot’s finest. Oooo…don’t mind if I do. Sorry I got distracted there.

I know it is not the ladylike thing to shout about what’s in your handbag but, in for a penny. The flatmate has a posh John Lewis handbag of label*, whilst mine vary from New Look’s synthetic finest to a Lidl carrier bag. Anyway mine contains:

• One ancient dog eared purse with the usual stuff as well as expired arty memberships and about 5 library cards. That reminds me, must take some books back
• My dongle
• One pair of broken headphones. FFS, can’t they make them Clare-proof? 
• Security pass 
• Oystercard 
• Battery back up. Flat 
• Crème brulee lip balm. Oh. Wondered where that had gone 
• A lippy. Useful to make notes with 
• A pen. *surprised face* 
• A mangled Prets napkin 

My phone is on my desk.

Everything works to plan unless I do a mad thing like bring library books into the office in my rucksack. So now my keys are in there. Happily I shall be taking everything home tonight so there will be no panicking about my keys.

Oh. So I am exactly like my flatmate then.

*Due to an *offended face*, an addendum. Apparently it's one of these. No I have no idea either.

Call me Ms Poppins

My bag hates me

No, really, it does. Not only does it hide my keys/wallet/fan/glasses without even a look of mild remorse, it does it with a regularity that defies belief.

Earlier I was looking for a piece of paper. This piece of paper has been in the back of my filofax for, well, weeks. Gone. Sucked up by the evil bag dwellers that somehow conspire to distort the perception of space and time and make it take me for ever to find everything.

So I emptied by bag out (again, I did it this morning) to reorganise. In it I found...

• Fan (I suffer from hot flushes, okay)
• Purse, several bits of paper, none of which were the one I wanted. I'll not go in to details
• 2 loose receipts, one from Tesco for water filters (£6.70) the other for the grocery shop I did in Lidl the other night (£25.02)
• One cellphone, my faithful Galaxy SII
• A banana (ooh, must finish my lunch!)
• Glass case, no glasses as I need them to read, so, err, wearing them
• One paper hanky. Best not ask.
• One Parker Sonnet fountain pen loaded with majestic purple ink
• One Totes brolly, unusually in its holder thingie
• One pair of very elegant gloves
• One Oyster card in a holder from The Parlour in Canary Wharf
• One pocket Kendal filofax (dark brown) with another Parker Sonnet fountain pen, notes, stamps and my passport
• One glass cloth that had escaped the case above and I've been looking for
• One elasticated ladies belt for those days when I need a little more definition. Also handy as an emergency sling if you come across a cyclops you need to down with a single rock
• One tube of hand cream (applies)
• Two reusable bags, one from Tesco, one from Sainsbury
• One pack of unopened paper tissues
• One plastic box that had my soup for lunch, all inside a ziplock bag incase the box leaked
• One small mirror
• One watch I need to get a battery for *sighs*
• Another receipt from Tesco (morning juice, £2.30)
• Earphones on a handy-dandy cable tidy thing
• The keys for Contrary Towers
• 2 lemsip capsules
• One pack of opened paper tissues
• One spare battery for said lovely Samsung
• One lipfinity lipstick and its friend the gloss
• Two post-it page markers
• One bottle of Sally Hanson Hard As Nails nail polish
• A third of a roll of extra strong mints
• A memory stick
• My banking access fobs (personal and business)
• One copy of The Pinball Effect by James Burke
• And finally, the office keys

So, that's hardly anything. I keep my spare tights, nail file, wipes, spoon in my desk drawer, so not even carrying those. And yet, mysteriously...

Things still get lost.