HERE’S A PARADOX. There’s ever more clever, superlight stuff you can buy to save you weight when travelling. New materials have made things that used to be bulky and heavy, slim and light. Modern rainwear? A fifth less heavy than the oilskins and tweeds of our forebears?
Ballistic nylon and titanium and Kevlar were once the material of space missions; now they’re stuff that saves you weight on a budget flight to the Canaries. A whole library can fit on to an ebook reader. Ingenuity in folding-collapsing-inflating-miniaturising stuff turns big things – chairs, shed-sized tents, beds – into tiny packages.
I’m tempted to buy a telescopic umbrella that weighs less than a chocolate bar. My imagination dreams up a scenario where snapped open from my pocket at just the right moment – so pretty much any day this summer in Ireland, but equally in an Asian monsoon, say, or on a sun-baked Spanish stroll – this micro-brella will prove me to be the kind of prepared-for-everything, savvy traveller admired by all.
But I seem to have forgotten all the old-fashioned, sensible ways of coping with rain. Finding shelter. Getting damp cheerfully. Or just buying a normal umbrella if – and only if – one’s really needed. All these solutions are far more “lightweight” than carrying a brolly through the coming weeks and months “just in case”. It’s only too easy to gather up lightweight equipment until you’re laden down with a huge bulk of half-useful stuff. It’s the less-is-more paradox, but in a bad way.
To be truthful, I’m never going to be an ultra-light expeditioner who saws the handle of his toothbrush to save a few grammes. For a start, I liked having real, paper books with me. Carrying a guitar makes me friends and often money as well. And I get sentimental about things.
I’m probably the last person in the age of the tablet computer to still carry a real-ink fountain pen into deserts, around Ireland’s coast in a kayak and across mountains on horses. My Waterman Hemisphere pen habit started with a friend’s keepsake to me when I left Western Australia 15 years ago.
The pen finally faltered a few weeks ago and I felt the need to adhere to my personal tradition of going with an exact replacement from the Pen Corner on Dublin’s College Green. The pen defines me more than anything else I carry. I make notes, write letters and draft books and articles on paper with it. I use it for sketching. It’s a talisman for good luck, too, and something to fiddle with like a single worry-bead, as well as a conversation starter. A piece of kit that can do five things rather than just one is five times lighter than an item dedicated to a single-purpose. But there’s a way to save even more weight when travelling.
I spent a week recently travelling with writer Chris Driving Over Lemons Stewart as part of the West Cork Literary Festival. He arrived with only a small bag. “My rule of thumb is travel as light as you can,” he told me, “One pair of jeans only unless you plan to get into some serious jeans-besmirching activity. The trusty travlin’ boots, two socks, one for each foot, just one hat. I don’t believe in raincoats . . . never owned one.” The latter pronouncement might be an allowably Quixotic sentiment rather than madness only because he lives in Spain, but none the less his small amount of clothing saw him through days of rain, out on two sea-kayaking trips and long walks and through all the social events that a literary festival can throw up.
At sessions in Bantry Chris played the guitar I’d carried down to west Cork, “I’d like to have brought my own guitar,” he said, “but it was too heavy and anyway you can always borrow one . . . like most things really.” Elegant proof that the lightest
kit of all is the stuff you leave behind.