I don't often write about bags. But in a moment of reflection it came to me. Who has been my closest companion for as long as I remember? Who has carried my material possessions without ever faltering or asking for compensation? Who went with me to Chernobyl and Greenland without moaning about being mutated, or attacked by a musk ox?
Helena Bonham-Carter? No, sadly not. Sydney Sweeney? Again, sadly no.
Who? NO, NOT WHO. WHAT. THIS:
What is it? It's a backpack made by Airwalk. I have no idea when it came into my life. I can't remember buying it. The bag seems to have sneaked up on me. It's one of those things, like combs and pens and mirrors and towels, that just appeared. Like those little sachets of salt and pepper that accidentally fall into your bag when you visit Wetherspoon. Where do they come from? Wetherspoon, obviously, but I was trying to make a wider point about the detritus that becomes caught in our gravitational pull. For some people - for hoarders - the debris becomes so dense that there is no escape, because it takes a hard heart to reject unconditional love.
Well, dear reader, my heart is hard, but I don't want to get rid of this bag. It still functions. And no-one has ever tried to steal it, or from it, because it looks grotty. In the pictures it appears to be a deep crimson, but that's because my camera is sensitive to infrared. In visible light it's as black as the colour of my true love's heart. I don't often photograph it, but here it is, in Greenland:
And here it is again, piggy-backed onto a bigger bag, in shadow:
Why am I writing about it? Because it's disposable. I don't value it. I wouldn't miss it if it was damaged. But I feel guilty, because after all the abuse it has suffered it held up surprisingly well. The shiny coating is coming off but the underlying fabric is strong.
What is Airwalk? Like so much of the modern world Airwalk was inspired by Jazzercise. It was one of many ripples that spread from the initial big bang of Jazzercise. We live in a world shaped by the echoes of Jazzercise. Back in the 1970s a pair of chaps in Southern California called George Yohn and Bill Mann owned a business called Items International Inc. The business imported cheap shoes from the Far East, but no-one cared until Jazzercise.
And skateboarding. I don't want to suggest that Jazzercise was the only thing that shaped the modern world. Skateboarding also played a crucial role. In the mid-80s Yohn and Mann decided that the future lay in trainers - sneakers, in the United States - so they attended a bunch of Jazzercise classes and studied a bunch of skateboarders and came up with Airwalk, a brand name that sounded a little bit skateboard-y. The company made a fortune from the trainer market, and then another fortune from the market for snowboarding and mountain biking.
Now, I'm not a businessman, so I have no idea what happened next. In 1999 the company was sold to Sunrise Capital Partners, at which point Yohn and Mann left the company. Yohn died two years later. It appears that sales collapsed, and three years later the only worthwhile part of the business was the brand name, and from that point onwards Airwalk became one of those businesses - like Atari, or Polaroid, or Kodak - where only a team of corporate lawyers can't tell if it's real or just a name. The Airwalk that made my bag almost certainly has no connection whatsoever with the Airwalk of the 1980s and 1990s.
I think the lesson is that if you want your legacy to survive and have meaning, don't sell it to a business that has "capital" in the name.
When was my bag made? I have no idea. None whatsoever. My hunch is that modern Airwalk's business model consists of buying up cheap, generic stuff from a variety of unconnected manufacturers in the Far East and slapping an Airwalk logo on it, so trying to trace a design lineage is basically impossible. Antiques experts can spot "tells" that date tables and chairs, little design elements that were fashionable one decade and unfashionable the next, but my bag is thoroughly generic.
I can find plenty of bags that have the same basic configuration, but none that look exactly the same, and despite scouring eBay and Google I can't find another bag like it. Perhaps it's not even an official Airwalk bag; perhaps it's a knock-off. Early 2000s?
It has the configuration of an office bag, with a separate pocket on the front for documents, a pocket inside for a laptop, a little zipped-up compartment below the grab-handle for earbud headphones. Beyond that the interior is one big space, which is handy for holidays. Purely by coincidence it's slightly undersized for EasyJet cabin baggage, although as of a couple of years ago it's too big for Ryanair, but stuff Ryanair. Did I take it with me to Hong Kong? No, I took a more substantial bag.
Now, over the last few months I've been learning how to ride a motorcycle, and I'm not convinced the bag will stand up to the rigours of being blasted by 50mph wind and rain, so it tends to sit unused for longer and longer periods. What will happen to this unloved, possibly-knockoff by-product of globalised capital management? It'll probably become fustier and grottier until I throw it away, or use it to dispose of hazardous waste (and then throw it away).
Or I may cut holes in it and use it as a Halloween slasher mask, but the point still stands. It is mortal, as are we all, doomed to die unmourned, but it existed, and it lived a life.
