Pack your bags, you backpackers!

OFF to the daily commute and all manner of discomfitures to put up with, from crowded carriages to signal failures and the inability of about half of your fellow travellers to wash. But now there’s a new menace and it’s springing up everywhere: you run a serious risk of severe injury via a backpack. Backpacks are the new briefcases, but with enough heft to them to inflict upon the unwary a broken nose.

Since when did otherwise normal commuters start carrying these monstrosities, like so many giant children going to school with their little rucksack on their back? They’re all over the place these days and given that most of the people sporting them are on their way in to the office, why on earth do they have to be so huge? What, exactly, do you need to take to work other than an apple and a book to read in transit, except that these days, you don’t even need that as so many people read on their phones? And yet there they are, looking as if they’re packed with enough equipment to climb Mount Everest.And all for a 20-minute journey into work.

It’s the same mentality that has people glugging water constantly, including members of the audience when they are watching a play. Who really thinks they are going to die of thirst if they don’t consume liquid for a full hour and a half? It’s like babies clamouring for sustenance: I wants it so I must gets it and that means now.

At least having your neighbour slurping water beside you is just an irritant,

rather than those backpacks, which must be an actual threat to life. One injudicious turn and you could be crushed to death against a magazine rack, another and you could be pushed on to the track. Station tannoys now regularly ask passengers to remove their backpacks, but they still take up a lot of space even down on the floor and the swing off the back of the owner could still result in a broken bone for anyone nearby.

It’s all part of the infantilisation of society, of course, in which it’s no longer unusual to find grown men in giant onesies and absolutely everyone is covered in tattoos.What is becoming increasingly unusual is to see a welldressed man in a well-cut suit with a decent and elegant silk tie. Can’t we have some kind of ban on adults dressing like children in a playground?

THE best-dressed man that I ever saw on the London Underground was a Catholic priest and I can say that with certainty, because he was wearing the full Monsignor’s garb. Black cape, widebrimmed black hat, he was a man of God who was properly dressed for his role in shepherding his flock. And no, he was not carrying a backpack.

He did, however, look like a mature adult and while it’s probably not realistic to ask that all men start wearing capes again and carrying silver-topped sticks, the very least they could do is start dressing like a professional.

Who knows? They might even find that they are being treated with respect.