Travelling together: I pack light, why should I carry her heavy bags?

Continuing our series, our globetrotting guru addresses your travel dilemmas. This week: packing and hauling etiquette...

Q: I pride myself on packing light, carefully decanting toiletries into small containers and planning my holiday outfits. My girlfriend stuffs a suitcase like she’s headed into a bunker to ride out the apocalypse, with first aid kits, copious extra layers and emergency snacks – and expects me to carry her luggage. Why do I always have to carry the big bag?

A: Stand up straight, young man, the day has come to initiate you into the traveller tribe. This means recognising that when you travel with another human, property automatically becomes communal. Travelling as a couple, family or group of friends or co-workers means hastily forming a nomadic tribe by the time we reach the departures gate. 

We all share the load, but in return we gain rights to the contents of each other’s suitcases.

The Nakd snack bars, the spare sports socks, the Lonely Planet guidebook, the insect repellent, the spare iPhone charger, the rattling box of paracetamol – they’re all yours, my friend, if you’re willing to contribute a bit of brute strength to the collective. 

Karl Marx probably wasn’t specifically thinking about wheelie Samsonites when he wrote “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

But it’s a useful summary of your duty to hump your travel companion’s suitcase up the broken escalator at Stansted and, in return, she will not deny you a dab of Sudocrem should you stamp on a rogue chunk of the Great Barrier Reef, or a dab of SPF 50 Soltan when your nose starts to blister after getting lost among the pink ruins of Petra. 

That suitcase isn’t purely a vessel for clothes and shoes; it’s a kitty, a shared bounty, a community asset. Think of your girlfriend’s suitcase as being a bit like the NHS; unwieldy, yes, and bearing the marks and scars of careless handlers, but you should be very, very glad that it’s there. 

This isn’t necessarily a gendered matter; groups of women or men are similarly obliged – by virtue of being nice – to cart the communal wagonload in whatever way they can, and contribute to it in the first place.

Although I will admit that the build of most men (broad shoulders, narrow hips, lengthy simian arms) makes me wonder if the male of the species has always been intended, by nature, to function as a suitcase-bearing underling serving womankind. But history took a wrong turn.

Anyway, your girlfriend, good woman that she is, has packed for the pack. You have packed as an individual, a lone wolf. Well, a lone wolf if everything runs smoothly.

family holiday packing list

If something goes wrong on this trip, as something really loves to do when people travel, you are more like the idiot wildebeest that strays from the safety of the herd and winds up disembowelled and flung around by lions in a pivotal sequence of Planet Earth.

Be grateful for your place in the pack. And pick up that suitcase. 

Anna Hart’s travel memoir Departures, published by Little, Brown (￡13.99), is out now. Order a copy for ￡11.99 from books.telegraph.co.uk