News
Russell's lost luggage
22/10/2024
A familiar feeling is nagging me, which I am trying to place. I’m standing with my family on a warm summer’s evening at baggage reclaim in Heraklion airport in Crete, where we have just landed for a 10-day holiday. Our daughters’ suitcase showed up some time ago and the throng around us is starting to thin out as our fellow passengers haul their bags off the luggage belt and saunter off to the taxi rank outside. There are now just a handful of increasingly worried people standing around the bare carousel and the maw of the baggage chute looks to have discharged its last suitcase.
Suddenly I place that nagging feeling. It dates from my schooldays. It’s the shame of pick-me-up football games, when all the sporty kids had already been chosen and the two team captains were pondering over which of us left-over weeds they could bear to have on their side.
After a further half-hour futile wait, my wife and I decide to give up on our suitcase. We queue at the lost luggage counter to fill out the required forms and take a taxi to our hotel.
In the taxi I ponder on the irony that this should happen for the first time in my life on this - the first holiday when I had given some sensible forethought as to what to take with me. My wife and I had even decided to share a suitcase to discourage us from overpacking (and also to protect us from the ruinous surcharge that airlines now levy for the right to take checked baggage on your holiday). I had made a list of the smallest number of essential items (clothes, toiletries, beach accessories, books etc) that I could possibly imagine needing on the holiday and then halved that number. In short our suitcase had been a trim, streamlined marvel of vacationing austerity.
I try to imagine what my cartoon banker creation, Alex, would do in this situation. Firstly, clearly it would never happen to him, as he would have taken a private jet. And if he did have the indignity of having to slum it on what he would deem “public transport” (ie a scheduled airline flight, albeit in first class) he would have Fedexed his luggage ahead of him to avoid the grubby business of checking it in and then hanging around at his destination at the whim of a bunch of shiftless baggage handlers.
Arriving at the hotel we find several other guests grumbling about the chaos and disruption at Gatwick. It seems that not only had we made the mistake of flying out on our summer holiday on the Monday after the schools break up, but the airport had also been targeted by Just Stop Oil protestors. In the event the only oil they managed to stop was our suntan oil, which was packed in the missing suitcase.
My wife and I check into our room and, with no unpacking to detain us, log straight onto BA’s lost baggage web portal. This soothingly informs us that the majority of missing suitcases are reunited with their owners within 72 hours. Why so long, I wonder? Gatwick is a mere four hours’ flight away from Crete. You could fly to the Moon in 72 hours. But perhaps BA’s lawyers are thinking ahead and preparing their customers for future lost luggage scenarios in the age of commercial space flight.
The next morning, with the prospect of three days of wearing only the clothes we travelled in, we go down to the hotel boutique to buy ourselves new outfits. The lady who runs the shop informs us that BA will reimburse us for any emergency purchases that we have to make while we await the return of our luggage. However there is a gleam in her eye that reminds us that she has a vested interest in encouraging us to do a supermarket sweep in her shop.
We end up buying only one change of clothing each, partly from a sense of propriety and partly from cynicism that we will ever receive any compensation for our lost luggage. So we now possess two outfits each. This resolves one classic issue we normally have in arriving in a hotel room. I am a home-maker and I like to unpack my suitcase on the first day of a holiday and stow all my belongings neatly in the drawers and wardrobe. My wife is more of a nomad and prefers to live out of a suitcase. But in this case neither option is available and we find ourselves living in a Buddhist-like state of simplicity.
Vanity and worldliness have been banished from our lives. After a couple of days of binary wardrobe options I begin to wonder if I really needed so many material possessions, even the stripped-down number of supposedly essential items I had packed in the ill-fated suitcase.
The missing luggage also provides us with a fertile topic of pool-side debate. How did BA manage to lose one of our bags, but not the other, when they were both checked at the same time? One would think it would be an all-or-nothing scenario. And where might our strayed suitcase have ended up? Is it still in Gatwick piled up in some enormous hangar full of unclaimed luggage, like the vast warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Or is it endlessly flying back and forth between London and Crete, overlooked in some hidden nook in the aircraft's baggage hold? Or has it disowned us and gone on its own holiday somewhere more exotic? Reykjavík? Honolulu? Bangkok?
BA’s lost luggage web portal has by now become daily, if not hourly, browsing for us and on our third morning it delivers the news that our suitcase has been located. Sure enough the recalcitrant item is delivered to our hotel reception after a 65 hour absence (so within the permitted 72 hours). It’s only been two and a bit days since I last had more than one change of clothes, but opening the suitcase is like seeing colour TV after having had a black and white set. Suddenly we are bathed in the glorious technicolor of Western consumer culture and our recent embrace of monochrome austerity and minimalism is forgotten.
Of course BA is very luckily that it is dealing with me and not Alex, who would already have unleashed a tide of executive assistants and highly-paid City lawyers onto their worthless heads to secure his compensation (which would also give him the opportunity to boast about all the expensive designer items his luggage had contained). But BA knows that normal people like my wife and I are not going to waste our time filling out insurance forms on the beach. And by the time we get home the memory of the inconvenience and annoyance will have faded as we slip back into our daily routine. The suitcase loss is a one-off, something that we can put down to experience. I realise that I have been going on holidays for over 50 years and I have never before had a suitcase go missing. So statistically it is unlikely to happen again before I reach an age when either I am either too old and decrepit to travel, or when I depart on my final Great Voyage into the Unknown (one on which no luggage is required).