Bagpride

bagpride (BAG-pryde), noun. The surge of slightly unearned self-regard felt when an entire shop, against all reasonable expectation, goes into a single bag, with the eggs on top and nothing crushed. It strikes at the till of the corner grocer and the big supermarket alike. One moment you are staring at a small mountain of carrots, onions, a loaf and a jar of honey. The next, it is all inside one paper bag, and you are walking out onto the street with a small, private smile.

The word joins bag with pride, in the old sense of a satisfaction slightly larger than the achievement deserves. It should not be confused with bootpride, which concerns the arrangement of luggage in a car before a holiday and is a considerably more competitive field, often involving whole families, a great deal of pointing and at least one person lying across a suitcase to close it.

The defining feature of bagpride is that it cannot be shared. There is no audience for a well-packed bag. The person on the till has already moved on, the person behind you did not notice, and describing it later to someone at home produces the flattest sentence in the language: “I got it all in one bag.” It is always answered with a single word, “right”. The pride therefore has nowhere to go, and it is carried home in silence, gently radiating.

Usage: “She felt a moment of pure bagpride at the door, walked forty metres down the street, and split the handle, which the language does not yet have a word for.” Attempts to seek recognition only make things worse. A photograph of a well-packed bag is one of the least interesting images a phone can hold, and the person shown it will say, quite correctly, that it looks like a bag.

Behind the joke is a very ordinary kind of pleasure. Many people take quiet satisfaction in small practical tasks done neatly: a well-packed suitcase, a tidy drawer, a dishwasher loaded so that everything fits. These little puzzles have a clear goal and a visible result, and solving one can feel good out of all proportion to its importance. Nobody else may notice, but the feeling of having done something small and done it well is real.

So the next time everything slides perfectly into one bag, with the eggs safely on top, allow yourself the moment. You do not need to tell anyone, and you certainly do not need to take a photograph. Just enjoy the walk home, holding the bag carefully by both handles, a small everyday champion of packing. And if the handle does split halfway down the street, at least you will have had forty glorious metres first.