Woodlife

“Pablo,” shouted Mrs Pablo from upstairs.

“Yes, my little Piranha?” I replied.

“Are you in touch with your feminine side?”

“I really don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, why do you have so many bags?”

“Ah. Yes. Right. Now I can explain that,” I said, gathering pace as I climbed the stairs in fear of one of Mrs P’s infamous equipment culls.

“You see this Maxpedition Falcon 2? This is my day bag. There’s enough room for a tarp, food and a cookset, but not enough to carry comfortable overnight kit.

“I use this Karrimor Predator Patrol 45 litre for that.

“I also take a small shoulder bag like this canvas shoulder bag for putting in bits and pieces, especially when I use the larger bags. I sometimes use this Flektarn shoulder bag for the same purpose.

“Now if I’m just going out for half a day or a wander, I’ll either take this larger canvas shoulder bag or, if I’m just tracking, I’ll take this MaxP Sitka, which is already loaded with tracking kit. All the MaxP bags can take a water bladder which is really handy.

“I can also use this Camelbak Cloud Walker which is the lightest day bag I’ve got and doesn’t look as tactical looking. It’s not as hard wearing though.

“Of course, I might be going out to do a specific project, so I’ll just take a cheap, tough old Miltec top loading bag. You can just dump stuff in it.

“Now, this is where it gets complicated. Are you listening my little long-eared bat? Right. These bags are the bigger bags. They are all 75 litres which means they can take kit for longer than 3 days, although I might take one of them for a weekend, which is of course could be less than 3 days, meaning I’ll have more room.

“This one is a Karrimor 75 litre which is top loading bag and the other is a Fjallraven front loading bag. The Fjallraven is designed more for hiking.

“This other 75 litre bag is an old Army All Arms rucksack. It’s huge as you can see but not really designed for long range walking. Both this and the Karrimor can have extra side pouches attached to make it up to over 100 litres. This bag contains a parachute. No, I’m not jumping out of ‘planes. The parachute is used as a shelter.”

Mrs P nodded and then said with a quizzical look; “Why don’t you use one of the big bags for everything?”

I paused for a few seconds, uncomfortable with the thought of an impending cull.

“That’s an easy question to answer. My feminine side has yet to develop it’s feminine logic!”

That did the trick. We’re safe for another year or so.

You can see one of these bags in action in this video of my 24 hour trip to the woods a couple of weekends ago.