I enjoy packing and unpacking, seeing it as a chance to regroup, shed unwanted items. Peter has a different approach. I wonder if his cavernous suitcase which carries increasingly idiosyncratic miscellanea has been sorted at all during our travels. When I say ‘any dirty clothes? In a businesslike but friendly way he looks completely baffled, much as someone might who is sitting their GCSE exam and finds themselves presented with a MSc examination paper. My only aunt was a good packer. So family lore goes. It was almost magical, says my mother, how much she managed to get into a tiny suitcase. I still thought of her as having this exceptional attribute when I visited her, birdlike light, blind, immobilized and incomprehending in her carehome bed with iron sides, clearly travelling nowhere. I wonder if I might have woven this personal quality as an epithet into her funeral address, but the metaphor of thoughtful preplanning and care met with contraindications in her personal life. Certainly her unusual and unexpected will left the family in disarray.