Connolly Shopper

It’s difficult being me, a real challenge. 

One of the problems is storage.

When I lived in London, easy, I just took my wallet, camera, phone and potentially a book. 

Now that I don’t live in London, it’s slightly different, every time I’m there I seem to take enough to get halfway up Everest or Zone 5.

The above, plus charger, notebook, spare camera batteries, SD cards, car keys, house keys, scarf, keep cup.

It’s a look I like to call overly protected school boy on first trip abroad.

Frankly embarrassing and death to pocket linings. 

So I carry a bag, this bag, look at it. CHIC.

There have been other bags, brief flirtations in American canvas and Japanese ballistic nylon, and I suspect there will be others in the future, hand made leather perhaps.

But, this, is for now, it. 

It’s from some company called Connolly, apparently they know a thing or two about working with leather and canvas, have a shop on I think it’s Clifford? Street? I keep meaning to go check it out.

Genuinely though, Connolly, Clifford Street, can do little or any wrong, this pleasing geometrically printed canvas bag is backed with waterproofing, and leather base, handles and edges. 

It manages to be timeless but of the moment, and like everything Connolly does, you come for the aesthetic and stay for indispensable. 

The aesthetic is simple, early 80’s Japanese take on British luxury, think tunnel of chestnut trees, crisp leaves touching edge of long driveways, and a fast capable English shooting brake. Now, that’s not quite – despite what people think – my day to day existence, but it works equally well in the pub.

The indispensable, well it’s beautifully made, quite fine in it’s finishing and there’s a softness to it, but one that makes it useful not flimsy. As for practicality, Mary Poppins. Not quite attempted the kitchen sink, but it fits most without looking it. 

Yesterday when in that London, ready for anything, with all my equipment, the weather turned welsh, and heavens tamped it down. Biblical. Lesser bags would have crumbled and turned their contents soggy, instead I got home and decanted and everything was crisp and dry. Clever Connolly.