# "Round here we're carving out our names... Round here we all look the same... Round here we talk just like lions, but we sacrifice just like lambs... Round here..." # - Counting Crows
Usually, on my daily journeys back and
forwards to the day job, I can be seen with a small bump strapped
across my back. It’s not a baby papoose
(not yet at least, and I’m not sure my day job would necessarily appreciate me
taking a child into work) but a small backpack…
Over the years, since beginning my working life, and of course during my
carefree student days, I’ve selected a weird and wonderful range of “man bags”
to help carry my ideas and scribble notebooks around with me, including an old
gas mask bag (blame Indy!) and what I thought at the time was a
cool-looking satchel, but now I’ve finally settled on what one friend
congratulated me on recently as “the smallest bag you could find”.
Although I like to carry such an attachment
with me, not only for my writing but also to carry my bait box and whichever
books I have on the go at any given time (I usually have one fiction novel that
I’m reading but always also carry a couple of non-fiction/reference books with
me to leaf through), lugging around a huge touring backpack would not be my
idea of daily fun, thus my hunt for the small knapsack style backpack that I
use today…
My real purpose here though isn’t to pass
on my recommendations of the type of bag a writer could get for themselves,
(although after almost losing a whole chapter and a few writing notebooks, leaving my backpack on a train last year, I’d recommend any writer to
become attached to their bags just to avoid being lost for words!), but
this post is more to just take some time to reflect on the objects that I carry
within my bag. Each of them are important
personally to me, but the act of carrying them is I guess a weird mix of
pilgrimage and practicality, and is analogous with my journey as an amateur scribbler,
in this early part of my writing life…