Cover image by beasturnchen on Pixabay
I have a little ritual I have to enact before I leave the house. A simpler version of the old Catholic mnemonic — spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch. This one ensures I have the holy trinity of items on me, confirmed with three swift pats to the body. Phone, wallet, keys. Tap tap tap. There. Now I can unseal the airlock and venture into the world, knowing I have everything about my person I need to manage my affairs.
I can feel some of you rolling your eyes at this, and you’re absolutely right to do so. As I swan out of Swipe Towers, I am powered on my merry, oblivious way by a huge waft of male privilege. I can travel light and easy, unencumbered by bags or slings or totes. For I am a man, and I wear clothes with functioning pockets.
Here’s a quote from author Warren Ellis to hang alongside this opening statement.
When my daughter was 16 she turned to me during a walk to a restaurant and told me she’d uncovered the secret of the patriarchy: “Pockets! All you bastards have pockets and we don’t!”
The notion that half the world’s population has trouble finding jeans or trousers that are not somehow functionally compromised is one I find impossible to rationalise. It makes no sense. At all. Why make trews with decorative flaps that cover nothing, or unusably shallow pockets? It feels petty, almost vindictive.
Look, I own a top which gets such regular wear I’ve almost worn out the elbows. It has two chest pockets with popper seals, two deep side pockets. As an added bonus, those side pockets are fully sewn to the inner lining to give another pair of usable pouches. That’s six storage options. Six. In an M&S shirt. How is that fair when C has to scour the High Street to find a jacket with an inside pocket and often fails?
Let’s swerve my performative indignation for a second and look at the second part of the equation. The inequality does not just stop at pockets. It’s the expectation as to what we put in them.
As mentioned earlier, I feel perfectly happy waltzing around with three items on my person. In fact, if I really wanted to trim the fat, I could probably manage without the wallet. Not for me the unguents, potions, and paraphernalia which, if I were female, I would be obliged to tote around in order to create and maintain a mask of acceptable appearance. Nope, I can blunder around looking like—well, the way I look on most days—without a word being said or a sidewise glance thrown.
I do, however, carry a bag on occasion. I have a backpack for work, which mostly serves as a carrier for my lunch and access pass.
Mostly, because there are other items in there, which gives me the excuse to move the narrative onto the subject of everyday carry. EDC, to give it the bro-friendly acronym. If a man has a bag, it is not to tote around items which might be considered useful in a normal modern urban context. No, EDC is a collection of objects which turn us into mobile repair facilities. Multi-tools. Torches. Really complicated wallets. Do a quick online search for EDC and prepare to roll them orbs hard enough to rotate them entirely out of your head.
I, sadly, am an open and eager advocate of EDC because, yannow, I like toys. And the process of adopting an active urban emergency response strategy (yes, I just made that up) means I can, in the name of preparedness for any situation, buy an awful lot of toys.
Here, I’ll open myself to your withering, judgemental gaze. My work bag, apart from the thermal lunch storage solution and work pass which of course comes attached to a heavy aluminium ratchet clip as opposed to a fraying lanyard like the rest of you losers, has room for the following:
- a Boker Plus multi-tool, featuring spring-loaded scissors, a knife, a saw, a bottle opener, a corkscrew, assorted screwdrivers and a couple of unfathomable but sharp pop-out objects;
- an Anker power bank;
- A collection of objects I choose to call ‘the mobile blogging and podcasting kit’ or MBPK (snappy, huh), which comprises a notebook and bolt-action pen, a fold-out Bluetooth keyboard, a set of cheap lavalier microphones and transceiver, another Anker powerbank and some USB cables with various different ends, all tucked into a mil-spec chunky nylon wallet with an eye-watering number of clasps, fasteners and attachment points, all of which basically means that, should I choose, I could record, edit and post a podcast and the associated backmatter from my phone in the pub;
- a random carabinier.
This is nothing compared to the load-out I have if C and I go away for the week. This swaps out the MBPK for a different powerbank, an even posher multitool from Blackfox, a Wuben G5 torch which packs several hundred lumens into a package the size of a book of matches, a pair of Soundcore p30 Bluetooth headphones, shades and reading glasses, and a microfiber towel I could clean a car with or soak up an armful of blood.
I am therefore capable of light roadside surgery in the dark, while listening to some R.E.M. however, if I sneeze and need to blow my nose, I still have to ask C nicely if she has a tissue.
The obvious question at this point is, of course, ‘what the fuck is the matter with you, Wickings?’ And you know, that’s something I pose to myself regularly. And yet, here I am, an urban warrior in the making. And I am, believe me, relatively restrained. There are plenty of EDC forums out there where men (yeah, always men) will show off neatly arranged pics of the crap they lug around on a daily basis. American posters, you will not be surprised to hear, have a lot of guns on display.
Look, this is not a modern problem. Admirable geek Bruce Sterling dives into the history of the multitool and finds Objects Of Specific Usefulness which date back thousands of years.
The worst bit of all this? My bare minimum carry, the keys and phone? My keychain has a mini-multitool on it which features a spoke tool for bike wheels and a three-centimetre ruler. Oh, and there’s always room in the watch pocket of my jeans for another one, a Gerber Splice the size of a single snappy chunk of a Yorkie bar which spring-loads out into a pair of scissors, a saw-tooth and straight blade, bottle-opener, screwdrivers and yes I know I know.
The white, middle-class middle-aged male privilege at play here is fucking staggering. I swan around with, in a worst-case scenario and if I was minded, three different ways in which I could cause injury. Yet I’m completely comfortable with it. Everything which goes outside with me is compliant with legal UK carry — the blades in my ownership are under 3 inches long and don’t lock. I comply with the spirit of the law. Of course, we all know how diaphanous that spirit can be. But I am cloaked and armoured in my elite status. I would have to work very hard for the police to stop and search me. If the face in the mirror was a different colour, I would not be writing this.
Let’s be clear. I don’t walk out on a weekday morning with the intention of causing harm. Actually, there’s a very good chance that, if I was in a situation where pulling a knife on someone became an option, I would very likely end up on the pointy end of the multitool I chose to shakily deploy. I’m a lover, not a fighter. The reason for tucking a clever pair of scissors into a tiny pocket comes from the urge to be useful. To be capable. To solve a problem, be that opening a box or snipping off a label or measuring up to three centimetres of something.
To be, in some bizarre, perverse metric, the rules of which were never clear and have clearly got mangled over time, a little bit more of a man.
The other side of that admission is, I guess, that I want everyone to be a little bit more like me. To be able to wear the clothes they want with the right amount of pockets, not to feel pressured into presenting a socially-approved face to the world, not to care about what they choose or do not choose to carry about their person. Ultimately, it’s all about privilege, and seeing it for what it is, and saying something about it. I’m not blind, I’m not an idiot. I see my status and the unseen, unsaid biases which empower it. What can I do about it, short of bloviating on a personal webpage for 1500 words?
Well, at the very least, I can tuck a pack of tissues and some paracetamol into my work and holiday bags, so if C needs a tissue or something for a headache instead of a fuse changed or an engine block dismantled, I can be of actual use.
See you next Saturday, boys, girls and others.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 