The handbag of safety

Filled with a Yardley lipstick and some Murray Mints

When I was a kid my mother always had a handbag. She may have had more than one, I don’t know, I wasn’t privy to that insider information, but according to my curious little eyes she had one handbag. 

THE handbag.

Inside this bag, typically made of black leather, she kept her coin purse, a handkerchief, a Yardley lipstick, maybe a bottle of Anais Anais or something by Lancome, her datebook or diary, maybe a pen or two, her keys and anything else a woman in the 1970s needed. Maybe there were Murray Mints. I reckon there was a photo or two, maybe a cherished trinket.

All Important Things for sure. 

To be given my mother’s old handbag when she bought a new one was, without a doubt, my greatest childhood thrill. I can still smell them now, the musty leather mixed with a powdery sweetness, the metallic tang of loose coins found in the pocket. 

To have things that needed to be in a handbag was to have responsibilities. To be able to dip into The Handbag and defuse any situation with a tissue or a pen or the keys to open the front door was, in my eyes, to be the centre of the universe. 

If my mother had The Handbag we were safe and she always had her handbag with her so we were always safe.

It makes sense I would try to replicate this as an adult. In my 20s it was a vintage suede bag, graduating to the Balenciaga knock-off I carried to London Fashion Week. It was such a good likeness all the underpaid writers had one.

In my 30s it was a coveted Fendi Baguette that Carrie Bradshaw convinced me I needed. Fortunately mobile phones were still tiny back then.

In my 40s I had another Balenciaga, this time a real one albeit extremely “pre loved”. I found it the year I moved back to London in that vintage shop in Notting Hill for a steal. I carried it to Brick Lane and Greenwich, NYC and Toronto. It accompanied me on many first dates and unlike the dates it never let me down.

That tatty Balenciaga now hangs on the coat rack after my bag requirements changed in lockdown. I didn’t need a big bag on my sanity walks, didn’t need to carry very much of anything when walking round the block.

I’ve just spent the morning looking for my next new bag. I have plenty of bags I could reactivate, but the promise of a new bag that could become THE bag is so seductive I found myself doing a Google image search from a photo of a Substacker wearing a bag I apparently MUST HAVE (I found it!).

I now know my ADHD brain loves the pursuit of the bag more than the actual bag itself. And indeed, I now have several bags in carts, each of them holding a potential dream, all possible paths to imagined nirvanas my dopamined brain has conjured.

Which bag will I ultimately buy? I don’t know yet. 

Is one of them the key to my dream life? Unlikely. But the pursuit of the dream still smells of musty leather and powdery sweetness, so I will buy a bag and it will disappoint me when it arrives but I will fill it with treasures and keep on dreaming.