This is a pretty boring post, but I feel the need to vent. On the plus side it's not got any Java in it which will make it of infinitely more interest to the non-technical part of my readership. In so far as I have a readership that is.

I bought a suitcase today. I've been looking for a good quality second hand leather suitcase for a while. Firstly because it gives me an opportunity to visit the inimitable Tring Market Auctions, and secondly because I rather like the idea of having all my clothes immaculately presented when I open my case, instead of having to rummage around in a canvas bag before angrily turning it upside down and shaking it to confirm that I've forgotten to pack any socks.

That's a best case scenario too. I mean, normally I pack my pants last, which means that at the end of a stressful day during which I've spent the best part of an hour trying to remember which intractably safe place I stashed my passport in after the last rummage through the massed piles of paperwork, at the end of this stressful day, during which I have found myself including items like the TV remote "in case there isn't one at the hotel" and a first aid kit complete with tourniquet (and then discarding half the things I do need because I'm not physically strong enough to cart the bag), the last thing I have to remember to put in my bag is the neat ironed pile of pants that's now under all the stuff I've chucked out of the bag to get basic essentials like lawnmowers and from time to time socks to fit.

Sorry about that run-on paragraph née sentence. Just thinking about packing gets me all hot and cross. Where was I? Oh yes.

Actually, today I bought a piano stool¹ and a locked suitcase. Half locked to be precise. Two locks, one open and the other very firmly and securely closed. You might think that this is the kind of thing that would get me hot and cross too (not the piano stool, just the lock - the piano stool was an unmitigated success in fact) but you would be wrong. I bought the suitcase in the full knowledge that it was half locked, fully intending to take it home and pick it. Do your own nose joke here.

So I got the suitcase home, and I spent a happy five minutes with a paperclip trying to get the lock undone. And then I spent a slightly annoyed fifteen minutes trying to get it undone, irretrievably damaging a variety of paperclips. Then I read a website on lock picking, which appeared not to actually tell you how to pick locks. So I signed up to ask a question, but while waiting for the registration email to come through I read the bit of the FAQ that said that they wouldn't help people pick locks just to get into things as that would be taking the bread from the mouths of honest lockpicks. No, their site is just for people who are broadly enthusiastic about picking locks in general, and prepared to go and buy locks for the express purpose of picking them. Fair enough, takes all sorts, bloody annoying but it's their site.

So now (and yes, at this point I was indeed hot and bothered) I had another go with a damned paper clip while trying to think laterally. I came up with an idea of brilliant simplicity. Probably someone at the auction house had locked the key in the suitcase. I'm not going to point out the flaw in my reasoning here, because you are probably not as cross as I was, and you are capable of thinking the matter through calmly, or at least of getting bored and going off to search the intarweb for prawnography or furniture porn or somesuch.

So I picked up the case and tipped it. There was indeed the sound of some small and possibly metallic object moving about. I shook the case, tipped the case, and generally behaved as if it was one of those complicated wooden puzzles that a child of three can solve in two minutes flat but keeps me bursting with undirected anger for anything up to a day and a half. I turned it upside down, pried my fingers under the lip of the lid, shook, and it dropped out onto the carpet. Yes! At last! A... paper clip. Bollocks.

After another twenty minutes of prying at the innards of the lock with this (admittedly slightly sturdier) paper clip I eventually resorted to anger and jabbed at it with a screwdriver. Rather to my surprise that did the trick in a matter of seconds. So much for subtlety and dextrous manipulation. Raffles I ain't.

And now you'll have to excuse me because I have to go and feed the gerbils of my friend who is scared of mice.

¹No, this is not the dropping left in the corner of its cage by a tame pianoforté.