Contents Of A Man's Man Bag

During a coffee last week I got chatting to an old school sort of guy who couldn't understand why a grown man would want to carry a bag around with him. To him I seemed effete and somehow less manly. Well that was his problem but it did begin to strike me that my "man bags" have been growing in size over the years. Technology is to blame for this, or to be more exact, technology and my love of it.

Here is a muggers guide to my bag.

1. The bag itself is a Think Tank Pro Retrospective 5. It's actually a small camera bag but made not to look like one. It's constructed of a sort of canvas material and is of a very high quality and comes with a waterproof protector for those of you who don't live in Spain. The best thing about it is that you don't look like a photographer when your walking around with it although it does annoy macho Spanish viejos.

2. My Samsung Galaxy SIII phone. I recently ditched the iPhone and moved over (converted?) to Samsung mainly because of the larger screen and my failing eyesight at close range. It does everything a modern day gizmo should do. It plays music, finds directions, takes photos and videos, displays books and even makes phonecalls.

3. An iPad which does all of the same things the Galaxy SIII does but with a BIGGER screen, This means I can edit and transmit images from wherever there is a wifi connection. That said it is no match for my Ultrabook computer but that's a whole different bag story.

4. A Kindle reader to read books. I could do that on the iPad or even the Samsung but not in full sunlight so I really needed one of these for lounging in sunny cafe terraces, drinking cortados and reading Hemmingway.

5. A pair of Raybans. Unfortunately these do not have the ability to access the internet or play music files.

6. A pair of reading glasses to make the Samsung, iPad and Kindle readable (Can they not build dioptered lenses into these things?)

7. My passport. The first lesson I was taught at photo-journalism college was to always carry my passport because, at any moment I could be sent off to some distant foreign land like Wales. Maybe I'll need a Scottish passport soon.

8. My late father's crocodile skin wallet from his navy days in 1952. I recently had some of the fine leather stitching replaced and it's now as good as new. It's of a very high quality although I have to say I myself would never actually buy anything made of crocodile skin.

9. A leather coin pouch that I bought which is indeed made of skin so I suppose that makes me a hypocrite.

10. A Fujifilm X100 digital camera with fixed 35mm equivalent lens. This is my carry around camera and what a fine piece of work it is. Most of my blips are done using this. Exposure set by a dial and aperture settings on the lens. Bliss! Soon to be updated to the new Fuji E-X1 with interchangeable lenses. Future bliss! NOTE: My Nikon gear is yet another bag story.

11. Spare battery and SD card for the X100

12. Camera connection kit for the iPad

13. A notebook and pen. Despite all of this bloody technology I still prefer to write stuff down on paper. At the moment it contains food shopping lists, recipe ideas, names and caption details from jobs, sketches of possible images I have only seen in my head and the rough outline of my idea for a novel that will never get written unless I decide to sit down and actually learn to write properly .

I may occasionally add my iPod and my Bose Sound Elimination headphones to this array of gadgetry but something would have to give although I suppose I could buy a slightly larger bag, which of course brings me back to my original point.