Packing

I love packing for holidays. It symbolises the launch of the trip for me; confirmation that I am actually going. I begin think about the many ways I will be enjoying myself and the stuff I will need to help me reach that state of not-working bliss. The packing always starts with a subtle 'I don't want to forget this' moment. I will be in the flat and will stumble on something that I should take away with me - say my passport - and thinking that I might not find it again so easily I will put it in a 'handy place', which is usually the middle of the living room floor. Over the next few days the pile gradually grows ... if I use my camera I'll worry that putting it back in the cupboard will sentence me to a camera-free trip as I'll forget to take it out again, so on the floor it goes. As clothes are washed, they don't go in the drawers, but in a pile on the floor so I know not to get them dirty again before I go away. As I write my snowboard boots are already sitting proud next to the supersocks, which lie alongside a water bottle and the UNO cards.

I leave for France in a week and already there is a pile a foot high and spreading; I have just added spare batteries and deep-heat muscle rub to it. When I went to Africa last year I packed so far in advance that a thin layer of dust settled over the firstaid kit.

No doubt anthropologists will say that I got this behaviour from the family dog who regularly used to gather her most precious possessions (bone, slipper, chewy thing) into a protective pile under the dining room table.