Luggage

What do you pack in your  luggage  when you go on your travels? For me it's always been very simple - clothes, books and toiletries - regardless of whether it's a business trip or a jolly holiday. But then I'm just normal, and that doesn't make for a riveting read. Consequently, I've been doing a bit of twice-removed baggage checking for today's blog in order to regale you with some of the stranger items that frankly less normal people have packed in their luggage. By the way, suitcases despite their name rarely contain suits these days.

Let's start with food. It's quite a popular one, baked beans especially. When the Beatles went to India in 1968 to study with the Maharishi for a few weeks, Ringo Starr took a suitcase full of baked beans because he and Maureen didn't want to eat Indian food. And currently on tv there is an advertisement featuring a moping man on holiday, sad because his suitcase full of baked beans has gone missing in transit.

And it's not just baked beans. For Brits going abroad the following also feature quite regularly: marmite, tea, chocolate digestives, tomato soup, fruit cake, brown sauce, pot noodles, tinned rice-pudding and corned beef. For people coming into the UK, it's mostly sausage, apparently. If I were to take any food item (and I don't, obviously) it would probably be mustard. How about you?

Weaponry is more common in luggage than one might expect. Sometimes it's claimed it is for personal use, an axe, a knife, a pistol, a short-sword, knuckledusters, length of chain, mace or pepper spray. More  often than not it is the smuggling of items of hardware for sale - hand grenades, guns (often in parts to be assembled  later), rocket launchers, silencers, clips of ammunition. Do these people expect to get away with it?

Drugs is another obvious one, not just for personal use but saleable quantities of cannabis, cocaine, heroin/opium and methamphetamine, along with a range of prescription medicines such as anti-depressants, contraceptives, sedatives, slimming tablets and tranquilizers.

Valuables feature quite often in the form of gold articles, diamonds and other precious gems, and hard currency in rolls of bank notes (usually stuffed into socks). Sometimes they are the family jewels of people fleeing for a better or safer life somewhere else, more commonly they are the trophies of robberies or part of an illicit but highly organised trade.

If none of that has raised many eyebrows let's up the stakes a little. Did I say stakes? I might have meant snakes, quite a popular number to pack in with the underwear, it seems. Other reptiles are available. Baby alligators, lizards and tortoises are quite frequent fliers. Then there was the man who tried to smuggle 100 tarantulas into France in a valise.

Moving up the scale, anaesthetised birds, rabbits, kittens and puppies packed carefully among the clothes are not unknown, as passengers try to bypass quarantine laws. There are cases (pun intended) of people smuggling tiger cubs in suitcases.  And recently someone attempted to leave Thailand with a red panda in his luggage. 

Among the other weird and wonderful items spotted by the x-ray machines can be found roller-skates, teapots, urns containing people's ashes, human skulls, cattle prods, garden gnomes, dumbbells and chastity belts - obviously not your run-of-the-mill holidaymakers.

But the strangest and most shocking example I came across was that of a boy in a suitcase. This happened in 2015 when a man originating from the Ivory Coast but legally resident in Spain returned to his native country to abduct and then smuggle his eight-year-old son into Spain. 

The boy had been packed in the foetal position into the suitcase along with a few clothes as padding. The man paid an unrelated Moroccan woman to take the suitcase through customs at the Spanish border. Customs officials were amazed, when the case was x-rayed, to see a body inside. Fortunately the boy was alive and not seriously harmed by his incarceration. The father was subsequently arrested and charged. The boy was reunited with his mother back in the Ivory Coast.

I did also uncover a couple of accounts of dead babies in luggage, but that's all too harrowing, so let's move on to less distressing ground. 

How many of you remember an ITV series from 1967-1968 called 'Man In A Suitcase'? In this instance the title character wasn't so much in the suitcase as living out if it, as he was technically on the run himself, accused of treason, earning his living as a bounty hunter and private investigator. The show was launched as a replacement for 'Danger Man' once Patrick McGoohan had called time and moved on to 'The Prisoner'. Richard Bradford played the PI McGill and the series ran for thirty weekly episodes, being filmed mostly at Pinewood Studios but also on location in Europe and Africa.

I suppose it had thematic similarities with 'The Fugitive' and 'The Champions' and though it never captured the public imagination in the way 'The Prisoner' did, it was perfectly good viewing and apparently is available as a set of DVDs nowadays. 

I didn't mention DVDs earlier, but they still feature strongly in smuggling-in-luggage scenarios along with other mobile and saleable contraband like cigarettes, perfume and dried fish (no kidding). And there I shall leave it - except for this latest weird little poem which derives inspiration partly (and very loosely) from another real-life incident of the Special Intelligence Services agent found dead inside a padlocked holdall in London in August 2010, partly from the 1951 satirical sci-fi comedy film 'The Man In The White Suit' and partly from the mysterious 'voices off' reaches of the imaginarium.

The Case Of The Man In The White Suit

Folded up like Houdini on a drunk week-end

in limp limbed linen, a big boy's lolling head

with those glassy eyes and GCHQ IQ waited

for the manipulator to unhasp the musty case

and arm him with deceptive plosives to spray

from that loosely hinged jaw, and never mind

any reputational damage such utter lies might

cause as he played to the gullible press corps.

He longed to make the most of  such moments 

at the weekly briefings, wished to go off script,

tell it like it really was for once, even just blink

or wipe that varnished grin off his face, but no

slack is given to a mannequin. For him thought

could never be master to the deed. He dreamed 

memoirs: My Life In Mothballs  perhaps, though

he feared he'd forever remain the reamed stooge.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)