Travelling with implements

Nobody has ever been stopped at a border for owning a hairbrush. The trouble starts with objects that have exactly one possible use, and the awkward moment almost never comes from a customs officer. It comes from a curious relative going through the wrong bag in a spare room.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Everything here is about consenting adults over 18 and the objects two of them have agreed to use. The short version: obvious things go in the hold, and most of the time you are better off not taking them at all.

Hold luggage, every time

Anything with one purpose and one purpose only goes in checked baggage. A cane, a tawse, a strap, a leather paddle. Cabin bags are watched in real time by somebody whose job is spotting shapes, and a rigid rod in a holdall is the most interesting thing on that screen all hour. The bag comes off the belt. It gets opened on the side table, and the conversation happens with fourteen people behind you who have nothing else to look at.

Hold luggage is screened too, and it does get opened, but in a room you are not standing in. Whatever they find in the baggage hall, you rarely hear about it.

What I know about customs, which is less than you want

I am not a customs officer and I am not a lawyer. Rules differ between countries and between airlines, and they change. Anything I stated with confidence here would go out of date, so what follows is a principle rather than a fact.

A paddle or a strap is not usually a prohibited item, because it is a piece of wood or leather and nobody has drafted a regulation about hairbrushes. Trouble comes from anything that reads as a weapon, and a rigid rod is nearer that category than people assume.

The second point matters more. The UK is comparatively relaxed about anything that looks sexual and a good many places are not, so what earns a shrug at Stansted can earn something else entirely from an officer working to rules you have never read.

Leave it at home and improvise

A hairbrush is a hairbrush. It lives in a washbag, it belongs there, and no border official in history has queried one. A belt is a belt, you are wearing it, and it came with the trousers.

Most of the rest is available wherever you are going. A wooden spoon costs about a euro in any supermarket in Europe, and a slotted one behaves differently for the same money. Buy it there and leave it in the bin on the last morning. There is a whole page at improvised implements, and several of them beat the purpose-made version anyway.

The strongest argument for doing it this way has little to do with borders. You stop thinking about the border at all.

Canes, which are the real problem

There is no elegant solution here and I have given up looking for one. A cane is around thirty inches of rattan. It barely goes into a large suitcase, and nobody on earth would mistake it for anything else. Posting one ahead is the idea everybody has, and couriers treat a long thin parcel exactly as you would expect. One of mine arrived with a permanent curve a third of the way along, which ruins a cane.

So buy a proper rattan one at the destination if you can, and leave it there. A garden cane from a DIY shop is not the answer: most are bamboo rather than rattan, and bamboo is hollow and splinters along the grain, which is why the cane rules it out entirely. Otherwise, a week without a cane is a week without a cane.

Hotels, and what housekeeping finds

Housekeeping has seen everything, and I mean that literally. Somebody cleaning rooms in a city hotel goes into a dozen a day and has found things that would end marriages. A strap over a chair back does not register on that scale, and the fear people carry about this is wildly out of proportion to the event.

Leaving things out is still bad manners, and occasionally it produces a quiet word from a duty manager, usually about the furniture rather than about you. Use the drawer or the case. Noise is what actually gets people spoken to in hotels, and noise and neighbours covers hotels and short lets properly.

Staying with friends and family

Here is where the risk actually sits. A customs officer does not know you and will never see you again. Your brother-in-law will be at the table every Boxing Day for a decade. Bags left in a spare room get moved and opened by somebody hunting for a phone charger, and a holdall left unzipped gets looked into.

So take nothing you could not explain in one short sentence, and keep it in a bag that stays shut. A padlock helps some people sleep, though a locked bag in a spare bedroom is a statement of its own. The wider version of this is at can I do this without anyone knowing.

Hygiene does not stay at home

A shared implement in a hotel room in Lisbon is still a shared implement. Leather, wood, rattan and rope cannot be disinfected in any country, so if two people are on the receiving end of whatever you improvised, that is the same question it is in your own kitchen. Travel offers one neat answer, which is that a one-euro spoon can go in the bin. The rest is at implement care.

Marks, and the swimming pool

This catches people out on holiday more than everything above put together. A week somewhere hot means swimwear in front of whoever you came with, and marks that ordinary clothing covers completely are not covered by a swimming costume. A campsite shower block is not private, and neither is a shared bathroom in a villa.

Plan the timing rather than the concealment. A session on the last night of a holiday costs nothing. The same session on the first night buys you six days of reading by the pool in a sarong and being asked whether you are feeling all right. Bruising also comes up over 24–48 hours and looks worse on day two, which is not the arithmetic people do on the plane. The timescales are on how do I hide the marks.

The time I got this wrong

I keep a tawse in a canvas holdall. That holdall is also the bag I take to work. One August I flew to Dublin without thinking about either fact, and security pulled the bag off the belt.

The officer unzipped it in front of what felt like the entire departures hall and lifted out a two-tailed leather strap. He asked, perfectly pleasantly, what it was. Several correct answers were available to me, of which the best was "a belt".

What came out of my mouth was that it was for sharpening razors. He asked whether I had a razor. I did not have a razor. He folded it back into the bag and wished me a good flight in a tone I can still hear.

Nothing happened, and nothing was ever going to. He had worked out what he was holding long before I opened my mouth. I spent the flight replaying it anyway.