Bag ladies

...everywhere you look!

The algorithm keeps showing me videos of famous women rifling through their bags. (Hand, not bin). Although…there’s a format! Hailey Bieber, legs in the air, head deep in the wheelie, sifting through her black bin bag like a city fox looking for chicken bones - “Oh my god, I didn’t know this was in here!” she’d squeal, delightedly, “this is a MASSIVE hairball I clawed out of my hairbrush last week, I usually leave them on the pillow for Jus to find” or Sienna Miller “I’ve been working on a movie in LA for 3 months, I think this used to be half a block of feta”. Relatable. We’re all the same. Just girls. Just simple, wasteful girls. (That’s probably how every episode would end, actually. With Selena Gomez or Florence Pugh saying that phrase down the barrel and sighing, then pulling the drawstrings closed. Yes, I think we’d have to fork out for the posh bags. This might be the new Carpool Karaoke).

I know this genre has been around for quite a while, but I am suddenly being fed it A LOT. I think it’s Vogue who do the most well known series. Actually I can verify this with…the internet! One sec. Oh look! She’s a journalist ladies and gentlemen…and a very good one at that. (this references a very silly video of Cilla Black delighting in busting an ‘undercover’ journalist who went on assignment to Blind Date. I can’t say ‘she’s a journalist’ without hearing it. Now you have the curse too.)

My extensive research shows Vogue’s version is called In The Bag. I don’t know what came first, but Bazaar UK do a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT series called Inside My Make Up Bag, where I think the USP is…flannels? Some celebrities cut out the middle man and do it for themselves on their own social channels. Basically, at any given time, there is a well-known woman somewhere, being made late for work, by the need to pour her stuff all over a sofa seat and comment on it.

These videos just always have the whiff of a politician on Desert Island Discs about them - you know when, say, Sir Keir’s team have convinced him to say he loves Fred Again or David Cameron wants to seem cool but talks about Chumbawamba’s difficult second album. It’s okay, lads, just speak your truth, say your favourite band is the Vienna Philharmonic or that your favourite thing to put on after a tough day is a discordant modem.

It’s the same with the bag videos, everyone’s overthought it to the point of madness. Often, the result is a designed-by-committee list of what The Public will want the famous woman to retrieve from her bag. What? Is that a real sentence? It’s sort of melted my brain, much like the videos themselves (but I have to watch them all to the end to understand how bad they are…okay?)

They tend to start fairly innocuously with ‘civilian’ things that no one can get upset about; car keys, painkillers, phone, sunglasses, chewing gum, a ‘tatty’ notebook, you know, things Normies might have in their disgusting Normie totes to use in their sad Normie lives. But the women in the videos then have to inject the extraction process with a dash of personality, that’s the whole point, that’s what The Public want. Just ask the committee! This is where it gets dangerous though. Not because they don’t have personalities, but because (my guess anyway) is that so many people have been buzzing in their ears saying things like “pull a kettlebell out, you can talk about working on your strength, it will be a great way to bring up your collab with Nike” or “what about pulling out a few volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica, you can talk about working on your strength, it will be a great way to bring up your collab with Nike” etc that they have fully lost any sense of what is normal to carry around with you. And so they produce full-sized glass bottles of perfume (of which they happen to be the ambassador), the ticket stubs from every concert they’ve ever been to (is this a Blue Peter time capsule or a handbag?), very niche tinctures for very niche ailments, brass hatstands…actually that last one is Poppins, but it’s not far off.

And the bags. Oh the bags. All of them cost thousands and thousands of pounds, natch. We wouldn’t expect one of the world’s most glamorous women to be carrying an Eastpak (no offence intended, my most coveted item of Yr8). Margot Robbie muses on her carrier of choice, a Chanel leather backpack, “it says, I’m pragmatic, I’ve got lots going on, I’m on the run”. Hmmmm. Now, I’m not a fugitive, but I have seen all the Bourne films. On the run? How on earth are you going to fit your weapons, fake passports and brunette hair dye in a mini Chanel rucksack, Margs? You’re just not THINKING, babe.

I’m just a bit baffled by the effort of the contrivance. What’s wrong with opening your real bag with real things in it? What happens if we know that you have a snotty tissue or a leaky pen in there? I guess there’s a chance someone will write something snarky about how you are trying too hard to seem like the girl-next-door…arghhhhh…I AM THE PROBLEM. But seriously, it’s all getting a bit Dakota Johnson x Limes.

We could just let women have the private sanctity of their bags, let them transport their tampons and anti-depressants in peace? Hahahhaha. Just joking. Here’s mine:

• No less than 5 lip balms (Neutrogena stick, Paw Paw mini tube, Burts Bees tinted, that orange packaged one that is a bit medical looking and a very premium Estee one that looks like a lipstick bullet). I am part desiccated coconut, so I can be found slathering myself in a humectant every 4 minutes. I panic I don’t have one with me and so always throw another one in before I leave the house. Just also found one in each coat pocket. So just the 7 with me this week. Must buy more.

• Many, many, many snotty tissues. Many many many clean tissues. Cancel me, GO ON. TAKE ME DOWN.

• No joke, two handfuls of utility bills, confidential correspondence, invoices etc torn into tiny pieces, for anti-identity theft purposes. Then I planned to take extra precautions by taking them to the British Scandal studio where there is a shredder (why? what have I done? why can no one know I exist? And what is Operation Blackbriar? One for the Bourne-heads there). The XL confetti pieces have come back home with me every night since Monday as I keep forgetting. Now a scrap of paper with my sort code or my address on it flutters out of my bag every time I retrieve something from the bottom

[I’m thinking this would have racked up 4m hits on Youtube, really regretting not filming it now]

• A book called Harvest by Jim Crace (paper), that I promised my Dad I would read so we could talk about it. “It’s very thin” he said encouragingly. We’ll come back to my abysmal reading speed at a later date. I’ve carried it around (bag on my bad shoulder, to really self-flagellate) for months. I’ve got to about page 25 three times. He gifted it to me in October I think. Will I ever speak to him again? Not until I finish it, or I will never learn.

• A bagel wrapper. The bagel place near where I record (the now twice mentioned podcast!) British Scandal, is VERY excellent. To be clear the picture is actually a NYC bagel I had at Russ and Daughters on 2nd March 2020, bagel zero if you will, but it demos the point I am about the make. The place near work is good apart from…they put wayyyy too much cream cheese on the bagel (an even more egregious amount than the protrusion pictured). In the sterile laboratory conditions of a London bus top deck on my way home, I often use a bit of bagel as a scraper to de-cream cheese part of the bread, and drop the excess cream cheese into the wrapper. The whole thing is as undignified as it sounds. As is forgetting that it was bundled up in my bag.

  So, you happy now? Seeing me like this?

  Do you feel like you know me a bit better? Now I’ve shown you my darkest secrets?

  Wait wait wait…oh shit, I think I can do that thing real writers do where they bring it back to the beginning….wait wait…shhhhhh.

  I know you’re going to say I should just ask for less cream cheese, but I have done a few times and the result is the same, plus it feels…picky or fussy. So I just do my method.

  I guess…

  you could say…

  I’m just a girl…a simple, wasteful girl!

  *sigh*

  *pulls proverbial drawstrings*

  x

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

What does it mean? What was the point? How did you make it all the way to here? We don’t know.

But I can tell you I love you for reading and commenting and subscribing and sharing, thanks for your support in the first month of this!

It’s just a fun place to make a mountain out of a mole hill really.

But every time I post I feel a tiny bit sick, out of an acidic combo of fear, doubt, staying up too late finishing it and probably still too much cream cheese, so your encouragement is metaphorical Gaviscon. No pressure, but if you don’t love this I might get an ulcer.

Love you byyyyyyyyyye x