A letter from a reader

At 67, I have finally stopped packing my toiletries in a carrier bag

I have never written anything like this before, and I want to say at the start that I am not a writer and I am not in the habit of telling other women how to pack.

But I stayed with my sister in Harrogate at the weekend, and she picked my washbag up off the guest basin, turned it over twice, and demanded to know where it was from. My sister has not approved of anything I have packed since about 1974. So it seemed worth writing down properly.

First, a confession I suspect is more common than anyone admits. I have travelled for forty years with my toiletries in a carrier bag. Sometimes the free zip pouch from a long-forgotten flight. Mostly an actual supermarket bag, rustling away in the suitcase.

Everything else I pack was chosen. The washbag was whatever was nearest the drawer.

It leaked hand cream on my good cardigan somewhere outside Preston. It sat on other people's nice basins looking exactly like what it was. And it never once occurred to me to do anything about it, because a washbag, I had decided, was not a thing worth choosing.

How it happens

Nobody buys themselves a proper washbag. That is the truth of it. They arrive free with something, or they are a carrier bag, and either way they are the shabbiest thing in an otherwise carefully packed case.

And then twice a year they sit out on a basin in somebody's guest bathroom, quietly reporting on us.

What I had wrong

I thought a washbag just needed to hold things. It turns out it has three other jobs I had never given it.

It should protect things, because reading glasses and little glass bottles do not enjoy travelling loose. It should open properly, so you can see everything at a glance instead of excavating. And it should be pleasant to look at, because it spends its working life out in the open, on basins and dressing tables, where a carrier bag frankly lets the side down.

The bag is called the Amara

It is from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now.

The bag is called the Amara. A quilted cosmetic bag in soft ivory with a cluster of purple roses stitched across the front, sage leaves around them, and a little gold zip pull. It is made by hand, the quilting is properly padded, and it stands up on its own base looking deliberate rather than deflated.

The padding is the part I did not expect to care about. My reading glasses travel in there now, cushioned, along with the little bottles that used to clatter and leak. Everything arrives in the state it left in, which the carrier bag never once managed.

What happened at my sister's

I put it out on her guest basin on the Friday night, on the folded towel, the way you do.

By Saturday breakfast she had picked it up twice. By Sunday she had turned it over, inspected the stitching, and demanded the name of the shop in the tone she usually reserves for builders.

I have known my sister seventy years minus three, and this is the first time she has copied something of mine and not the other way round. I intend to dine out on it well into the new year.

Three things I have learned since

One. The zip changes how you use it. It glides round and opens the whole top wide, so you see everything at a glance. No more tipping the entire contents onto a hotel bed to find one lip balm.

Two. The three sizes are a system. A small for the handbag essentials, a medium for a night or two away, a large that swallows a full week of toiletries. I bought all three, and for the first time in my life everything has its place. It wipes clean with a soft cloth, too, which the leaking hand cream has already tested.

Three. The roses earn their keep. You can spot it in a packed suitcase in half a second, it looks lovely left out on show, and there are forty-odd other handmade designs in the collection, which I am treating as dangerous information.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me look twice.

The Amara is £29.95, whichever size you choose. It was £60.00.

My first thought was that a handmade quilted bag at that price would be flimsy, thin padding and a zip that catches. It is not. The quilting is plump, the stitching on the roses is dense and neat, and the zip has not caught once. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and the sale is on now.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman had written, “My glasses have survived three trips in it and I can find my lip balm without emptying the whole thing onto the bed. The roses get more compliments than my outfits.” That was the one that decided it for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat with a pot of tea and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If your toiletries also travel in a carrier bag, or the free pouch from an airline that may no longer exist, you have not failed at packing. You have just never been offered a washbag worth choosing. There is one now, handmade, padded, pretty, under thirty pounds, in three sizes and forty-odd designs.

Not because a washbag will change your life. It will not. But there is something in setting your things out on somebody's guest basin and knowing they look chosen, that I had quietly filed under not-worth-bothering-about. My sister's face on Sunday says otherwise.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and these are handmade, so the batch is the batch. Once it is gone it is gone.

The carrier bag has been retired. It was not thanked for its service.

Maggie