Void

My backpack is something else. I pulled it out of the bag to find it had no straps. Then I realised that the cunning beast is able to pack away its own straps into a long tongue-shaped pocket running up the part that rests against your back. Having pulled out all the straps, and oooh my there are a lot -- including a variety of straps to strap straps onto straps -- the whole thing looked like a huge dead stag beetle on its back.

Then the dilemma came. What do I do with the long tongue-shaped flap that I unzipped to release all the straps? It can't zip back up because the straps are in the way now... and there appears to be nowhere for it to go... unless, of course, I'm content with walking around with this long black flap hanging off my arse.

I start to look everywhere on the backpack, almost turning it inside out in the hopes that it might solve the problem.... all the time finding more and more pockets and sub-compartments -- even a kind of parachute-like thing made of waterproof material that comes out of a side pocket to cover up the whole bag when it rains -- but nowhere for this flap. To make things more mysterious, it has an enigmatic strip of velcro along its bottom edge, at the point where it joins the bottom of the backpack, and yet there is no other velcro in sight for it to stick to.

By now I'm starting to think there must be an instruction booklet that I threw away without realising and so I start rummaging around in my bin. It's at this point that I start to swear at the air, cursing 21st century man for inventing backpacks so fucking complicated that they would conceivably need instruction manuals.

I give up for a while. Later I take a look at my backpack and I notice the thinnest, slenderest hint of a slit at the bottom of the bag. Working my fingers into it, I find more velcro! And lo and behold it opens up into a vast tongue-shaped cavity, running up the entire front of the bag, so deep that I can stick my arm in up to my elbow... a true Mary Poppins handbag moment. If I'm not careful, I'll be packing this bag somewhere out in a plain in Tibet and it'll swallow me up, and nobody will ever know what happened to me.