Suzanne Harrington: Cheap airlines and their baggage limits have made us packing pros

We take great pride in our packing skills.

Irish people residing in Britain are some of the most skilled packers in the world. The most strategic, the most ruthless, the ones with all the packing hacks. We have evolved using Darwinian adaptation.

Survival of the lightest.

We have adapted to cheapo airlines and their stringent, cheeseparing requirements, whittling down our travel belongings to one small bag that will fit under the seat in front.

We go to great lengths to avoid those gimlet-eyed enforcers at the gate, trained to clobber you for cash if your bag is more than 10 centimetres dilated.

We laugh at the priority boarding eejits, their queue longer than ours, with their mimsy little wheelie suitcases making the aviation moguls richer with every flight. Not us, the single item carriers, the lightest of light.

We take great pride in our packing skills. The ability to visit the family carrying only a Kindle and a toothbrush, plus some tightly rolled items — components of a micro capsule wardrobe selected for their compressablity, packed as carefully as bricks of cocaine inside the hull of a small boat.

We arrive in Ireland in the clothes we stand up in, fairly confident we will not be invited to any surprise formal events — if we are, we are liable to rock up in Crocs and a onesie. Perhaps accessorised by an extravagantly oversized pair of earrings, carried on board by our ear lobes, thereby beating the economy airline system.

This is the extent to which we have gamified our packing. Which is why, when we economy micro-packing regulars go long haul, our system collapses. We implode. Things fall apart.

Imagine fasting, then being let loose at an all-you-can-eat buffet — the long haul baggage allowance is like the dizzying sensation a battery hen experiences when let out of the cage to go free-range.

With 25kg to play around with instead of 250g, our best-laid plans to pack light, to leave room to stuff all the treasures of a Bangkok market into our body bag-sized rucksack, are annihilated.

We are overcome with crazed, devil-may-carelessness. We pack with wild abandon, shoving in all the essentials, then the not-quite-so essentials, followed by the kitchen sink.

The rucksack is soon the size of a kayak. Drunk on baggage allowance, everything goes in.

Obviously we will come to regret such profligacy. The weight of the rucksack, stuffed to its bursting zips, is like giving a corpse a piggyback. This becomes apparent while staggering through arrivals six time zones into tomorrow, hitting a wall of heat that wraps itself around you like a binbag in a sauna.

Packing all those extra books — hardbacks — doesn’t seem like such a luxury now, squashed in alongside the yoga mat and the hammock and so many other frankly ridiculous items.

Suvarnabhumi International Airport does not offer a sherpa service. I wonder if I can stash my stupid luggage in a giant locker, and leave the airport with just a Kindle and a toothbrush, like any sensible person.