A change from comic posts – an entry in the occasional (like… every ten years or so) genre of “I am actually spending money on buying myself something nice” posts. I have worn out two shoulder bags in the last twelve years, one I got for myself and one my other half got me. After getting a medium-sized bonus at work, and probably reading a couple too many r/BuyItForLife adjacent sentiments,* I was in the mood to spend a bit of money on something that would last at least another decade or two. A pal recommended a Hungarian firm called Bagaboo, who are mostly focused on cycling kit but whose messenger bags seemed just the ticket. Their selling points seem to be that a) they handmake everything in Budapest and b) as a result their bags are extremely customisable, in terms of both colour and adjustments.

I just needed a tough laptop bag so ended up plumping for their extra-small messenger bag, in dark blue with burgundy trim and a bright yellow liner, and a laptop sleeve in reversed colours. They warned me that it would take a couple of weeks, but it was actually a matter of days. However, I then lost a week to an unbelievable clown show of incompetence from DPD, whose broken website convinced itself that I wanted to pick it up from a warehouse in Croydon.

The result is perfect, comfortable but extremely tough, with inner pockets for headphones/chargers, and outer pockets for pens and misc things. It also doesn’t attract too much cat hair…

I’m extremely pleased with it, and my only regret is not getting a grumpy frog custom-embroidered on it. Would recommend to a friend or colleague.

* _{I don’t even use Reddit! But as the world of forums and blogs withers away and disappears from the face of search engines, it does seems to be the last source of real human interaction which hasn’t been either cloistered away into private Discord servers or enshittified into a useless nowhere-land of algorithmic dreck by evil megacorps. I mean, there’s bluesky as well but using bluesky regularly feels too much like pretending that Twitter was good before it got taken over by a ket-addled goose-stepping manchild.}