an inappropriate volume

After becoming computationally portative I decided I needed to grow a bigger bag to be able to portatate the compute when required. I was hoping to be able to achieve everything-required-in-one-bag including camera stuff, lunch-stuff, a bottle of water, llapptopp and camera and lenses. I was wary of the camera-backpacks as they all seem to share a common theme of being fiddly to retrieve the camera from when in a rush and I've grown quite used to my shoulder-style camera bags over recent years. The only available thing of sufficient size turned out to be slightly too vast; it was wider than me and so would have thrown out my sense of how big a space I need in order to be able to fit through gaps between the slow people on the pavement and the width meant it had to be grabbed by the corners and guided when negotiating breakable things on shelves in shops. Although the extra space in the camera section meant that everything was comfortable rather than slightly too tightly-packed at times it did mean that there was about as much space as the camera and lenses occupied being wasted directly above them as the bag was simply far deeper than it needed to be. If the detachable camera-tub section were half the height and had a gap at one corner so that books, apples, pens, flasks and the like could be tucked beneath the camera-section with the camera always on top and easily accessible then it would have been fine but it didn't so it wasn't.

I gave it the week available but it's just been sitting on the floor not being used so it was re-boxed and sent back to the internet under the watchful eyes of the Ben's Pizzas XL and XXXL. Went for a Dark Side backpack instead, partly because it was on cheap and partly because it looked as if it would take the laptop and a flask and some lunch and some books and stuff and I'll carry on doing what I do bag-wise at the moment and carry a camera bag over the shoulder and a backpack over the top of it so that things which need to be safe on the back are safe on the back and do not scrape along the pavement when I crouch and things which need to be swiftly-accessed in case something interesting happens are swiftly-accessible.
In the meantime I have amended another shoulder-bag with bubble wrap to make it a safe home for the laptop until the New Bag arrives.

***

Seeing as my original target coat failed to be in any way comfortable when I got round to trying it on this afternoon I wandered through the other waterproof-coat-shops to get some ideas of what fits and is comfortable and to see if there was anything being sold pleasantlycheap; although I'm probably owed several years' interest in terms of owning a proper breathable waterproof coat due to not getting one for years then finally getting a crap-but-OK-in-a-pinch coat in the bike shop sale a few years ago I'd still prefer to not pay a massive amount for something I would hope to never have to wear even if it does then stand a better chance of being comfortable and unsweaty when it does have to be worn even though I can get uncomfortably sweaty in a T-shirt in Edinburgh in December and will probably never experience an entirely comfortable coat unless I move somewhere significantly colder. I was in the fourth such shop alongside other apparently normal shoppers actually feeling vaguely pleased at having found something breathable, packable, sufficiently sized to not be massive about the arms or tight across the bottom and without a silly wired peak in the hood when I became aware that a noise emanating from behind me was directed at me. One of the shop assistants was gesturing vexedly at a pile of coats on the floor and speaking something I couldn't initially make out as it sounded like "ayaleaf eeshak oghgrwf?" but turned out to be "did you leave these jackets on the floor?"
I was still mildly bewildered by the voice and could only mutter that it was nothing to do with me before the yah-shopper responsible wandered back into shot and said something about "just trying them on" and wandered off again. By this point the being-pissed-off had kicked in so I wandered back down the other end of the coats before I started glowering at the assistant. A minute or so later he wandered past in his restoring-coats-to-hangers mission so I asked that he had understood that it was not me who had left his precious coats on the floor to which he replied that he did. No apology, no "sorry for grunting aggressively at you when you're only trying to spend money in our manky shop" or anything; had he apologised we might have shared a mocking comment about the shopping-yah concerning his inability to restore clothes to hangers being due to the fact that his butler would usually do that but the impolite little worm evidently thinks it's OK to not apologise to people one has insulted. If I didn't get ten percent off their silly prices via work and if they didn't stock lots of Merrell I probably would probably have never shopped there in the first place. Anyway, Nevisport are on the List now alongside the Bicycle Works (walked into shop, spent twenty minutes comparing specifications and prices on bicycle computers, walked up to counter with selection to be told "sorry, we're shut" by a bloke who had seen me walk into the sodding shop) and any sort of shop where one is not permitted to simply browse but must instead experience the shop through the yakking mouth and fancy haircut of some form of shiny assistant.