There's a curious feeling of the unreal when you discover that your bag has been stolen. You find yourself repeating to yourself, and to anybody else that will listen, "But it was just here, I left it here two seconds ago. Just here." It's the closest thing we have to magic in this secular age and there is something about it that just flummoxes our logical minds - one minute the bag is there, the next minute it's not. Despite the crime figures and the urban myths that tell you you're more likely to find your bag has been nicked than you are to find a bus home, robbery is never the first thing that springs to mind. Instead you start looking in the strangest places, like behind pictures or under strangers' hair, as though you might have absent-mindedly left it there on the way to the bathroom.
When mine disappeared from a pub the other weekend, I insisted that my friends go on to a party without me while I did a thorough search of the sugar bowls. I think this is really just to stave off the moment when you have to sit down and work out exactly what has been stolen. The first thing other people always think of is money - did you have much cash and have you stopped your cards? But when it's your own bag that's gone missing, these are the incidentals (unless of course you're in the habit of carrying large bricks of cash with you, which in this country doesn't seem to be such an unusual habit after all).
You can stop all your bank cards with a single phone-call and within a few days, you'll get squeaky new ones in the post. It's a bit of a hassle but that's all. No, it's the missing stuff that really sucks. When my bag was whipped, all I could think of was "But I've had that lipstick for five years and they don't make that shade any more. It can't be gone, I left it just here."
After I'd trawled the back gardens of the area in the hope that it had been ditched, I gave up and started to mourn the things that had disappeared. The loss of my Filofax, which contained numbers and addresses that I would have to track down again, really irritated me while the 50-unit phone card I had just bought aggravated me. But I was only near to tears when I remembered a 1950s photograph of my great-uncle as a young man which I carried in my wallet or a card I'd got from a friend in New York, a feather I'd picked up on a beach in Ecuador, that lipstick, and a scarf from a friend.
In other words, it was the disappearance of all those bits and pieces of sentimental nonsense, which really upset me. I lay awake that night and tried to piece together exactly what was in that bag. Is any woman really able to remember what's in her handbag? We stick so many things in there at random moments - "Ooo, I'll just pop in those leopard skin hair-clips/sushi rolls/collected sonnets in case I need them later." All through the night, I'd sit bolt upright in bed as I remembered yet another bit of obscure memorabilia that had gone missing.
In the end, I just put a moratorium on thinking about The Bag and refused point blank to consider it further. I picked up my new cards, tucked them into an old wallet and filed the whole experience under The Further Martyrdom of Louise. Yet gradually I realised that I actually quite liked having nothing of any value, either financially or sentimentally about my person. Rather than constantly thinking "I wonder did I remember to put in my umbrella/echinacea pills/brain this morning?" and then rummaging in the bottomless pit for five minutes, I was able to say with absolute certainty "Well, that can't be helped."
Carrying my bag became a simple action involving one hand and a swinging motion, rather than a manoeuvre involving cranes, inner frames and chiropractors. But most of all there was the mental relief - it was as though losing my bag had stripped away a layer of plaque, a detritus of paper, pills and biro pens which I'd had to wade through to get to any decision of late. Of course, once I'd made this discovery, I got a phone call from a very nice man who had found my bag - the wallet was missing but most of the other stuff was still there.
I was delighted to get it back but it made me realise just how much of my invaluable cargo I hadn't even realised I had lost. It was truly great to get back the photos and the diary but did I really need four types of mints, three nail files, a Euro converter and 47 assorted business cards back in my life? I started to look at my flat with new eyes - how on earth had I managed to gather so much stuff? Every surface, every cubby-hole, every shelf was groaning with papers and clothes and make-up and things of no known purpose whatsoever. On the rare occasions the flat was actually tidy, it was like a giant game of Jenga with a ton weight of stuff just waiting to collapse if you moved a pencil.
The most worrying thing was that it had taken such a short amount of time to gather all this stuff. It's not so long since I came back from 10 months of living out of a rucksack, with a rather fanatic "if I can't carry it, I don't need it" mentality. Now my flat looked like the residence of an old woman who kept cats - I even had a used plastic bag collection and a shelf for second hand wrapping paper, for God's sake.
There just seems to be so much more stuff about these days. This an age of easy consumerism, where people work long hours dreaming up objects to fill a need which we didn't realise we had before, and we spend equally long hours earning enough money to buy them. To me, those irritatingly tiny books are a perfect example - a few years ago, there was no such thing as those four inch square books telling us how to be calm, how to have the wit of the Irish or how to make cocktails.
Now every home must surely have at least one small book of shallow wisdom, and after the first glance who ever reads them? Then there's the weight of paper that accompanies everything - I refuse to believe that computers and the internet have created a paperless society at all. I have three bulging files containing pieces of paper about how my computer works and each day I get at least four press releases about new web-sites or internet services. In some way, all this stuff seems to be directly proportional to how much time we have to enjoy our leisure. The harder we work, the more we feel the need to spend money to justify all the hours we work.
I want to do a William Morris on it all. I want to throw away everything that is not beautiful or useful in my home. I want to get rid of all the small books. I want to throw out plastic bags and used string. I want to give sacks to charity, sacks to recycle, sacks to the bin-men until I'm sitting in a very zen, calm space. The only problem is that I know myself. Once I was sitting in my zen, calm flat, it would take about five minutes before I realised that this space would be perfect, if it just had a bit more, well, zen-promoting, calm-inducing stuff in it.