Seems we ladies all suffer from the pack mentality

I’VE just arrived in New York, where the place is on tenterhooks about whether Donald Trump will be their next president, or if Hillary Clinton has rigged the election. Whatever the result, what most people seem to want is for it to be over, because both candidates have been campaigning since Lincoln was a boy.

I just want Donald Trump to give us back the words ‘disgusting’ and ‘sad’ – and for someone to make the pound rally a bit, because the current exchange rate for a fistful of dollars makes me wonder if I should be bartering with Marmite and Branston Pickle instead.

To avoid unnecessary purchases, I’ve decided to bring most of the house with me, including shampoo, teabags, clothes that anticipate every climactic eventuality from the tropics to Antarctica, and a bottle of gin.

In other words, I’m a baggage-dragging embodiment of the P&O Cruises survey that found women pack twice as many clothes as they actually wear on holiday.

The saintly exception is Helen Mirren, who claims that when she goes abroad, she packs a hanky’s worth of undies then scoops up her holiday clothes at the nearest charity shop. After a fortnight floating around in vintage togs, she bags them up again, and dumps them at another thrift shop on her way to the airport.

LET’S set aside the nagging thought that not every country embraces thrifting, and skate past South Australia, which felt compelled to issue a health directorate reassuring customers that the chances of contracting an infectious disease from second-hand clothes was ‘very low, if washed in hot water’.

Instead, let’s admire the truffling skills of Dame Helen who dives into a charity shop and comes up with treasure when the rest of us might end up with PVC slip-on shoes, trousers with an elasticated waist, a gangrene-coloured blouse from Mothercare and an autobiography by a 70s snooker player. I’d use the word ‘sad’, but Donald says he’s still not done with it yet.

Is overpacking genetic? Because I come from a family of chronic overloaders who cannot quite trust their destinations to provide toothpaste, hairdryers, or loo roll. On childhood holidays to France, home of regional delicacies and epicurean delights, we smuggled in bags of soya mince and cheddar.

My middle sister almost got arrested on the Eurostar for packing a bread knife in her hand baggage because she wanted to make up sandwiches on the Continent and wasn’t confident that Belgium or Spain would be able to conjure up a gadget that could rise to that kind of highly specialised task.

The Synnots’ ‘here be dragons’ instinct kicks in like GPS once we are ten miles outside the city limits. If we hillwalk in the Trossachs, the backpacks resemble an ascent of K2. In fact, when my dad and his brother hiked the actual Himalayas my uncle took along an accordion.

So, naturally, when faced with a recent two-day business trip to the Midlands, my other sister dispatched her husband to buy snacks, in case her hotel ran out of food.

‘Your nuts’, he announced, handing over her items with a slight smirk. ‘And your crackers, your bananas… and a fruitcake.’

At this point, she began to suspect she was being satirised by a Two Ronnies sketch. Especially since she had not requested fruitcake.