The Unbearable Lightness of Baggage

Pakistan International Airlines lets me take 47 kg of wordly goods. It's generous but now that I'm packing I judge everything by what it weighs. The papier mache comes, the gold stays. Fancy jars of face-cream, bad; squeezy tubes, good. Even literature is weighed and if there aren't enough words per page, the paper is not worth carrying, no matter the meaning. Poetry, I have calculated, has the worst word to page ratio. It's worse than being mercenary; I'm greedy for grammes.
Well, sometimes the better part of me overrules. I have, for instance, packed a pair of tiny glass vases wrapped in clothing and placed in a jewellry box simply for the possible wonder of seeing them again, maybe, high through the rockiest roads, with a different light shining through them.
I decorate my emptying rooms with another goodbye card.

Journeying North

I am traveling north, home. My train was canceled, so I caught another and got late for the bus connection. Now, trying to catch up with the bus on a train going the other way, I am confronted by an official who is angry because my bag touched her. She fines me for traveling on this train, and I am humiliated. I'm angry with a train company whose name I have already forgotten, bland as it is. To quibble is to waste time, more precious than the money right now.
How bleak travel in England can be. On the coach, passing places whose names I have never learned, I wonder how I'll be feeling next time I travel north, home, this time in Pakistan. This motorway with its traffic neat as graphics will give way to roads blasted from mountains with buses owned by men as horses were owned by their fathers: beasts of burden to be goaded and beaten up hills; protesting, thirsting, striving then, on arrival, hosed down, fixed up and decorated with fantasy paintings and silver chains to the ground.
Last summer on such a bus, far from being fined and flustered, I was served tea, bread and meat personally by the driver, who refused payment.
"England will not have roads this bad," he apologised.
"Neither does it have mountains this high," I replied.
In his driver's seat, he visibly swelled with pride.