When a woman with a small pull-along airline case asked for ‘The Griffin’ I naturally took her to the sleazy pub conversion in Clerkenwell. On arriving my passenger got out and walked past the thickset tattooed bouncer on the door, as another heavily made-up young woman got in with the ubiquitous suitcase full of stage outfits and asked for Brown’s – a well-known strip club in Shoreditch. With that, girl number one returned wearing a rather startled expression to inform me accusingly that it was certainly NOT the Griffin pub she wanted. The moral of the story: Don’t always assume small flight bags are full of G-strings.
Londoners have fallen in love with these modern versions of a valise and they’re everywhere, some owners couldn’t imagine life without them.
They are usually found directly in front of you, carried up escalators, squeezed into lifts or pulled down the pavement. Stand in any tube station or on any street corner, particularly on a Friday or a Monday, and one of these beasts will come lumbering into view within seconds.
London is full of people trying to get somewhere else, escaping the capital for a weekend break. At first glance, the wheelie suitcase appears the perfect solution, but as diamondgeezer points out, the traditional suitcase is carried by the side, adding only width. The new wheelie suitcase trails behind, adding just depth instead. The surface area of ground covered is therefore noticeably greater with a wheelie suitcase than it is with the traditional handheld model. Even worse, this surface area increases the shorter the traveller pulling the suitcase along. If you’re six-foot-something then the handle of the wheelie suitcase points pretty much straight up, which isn’t too bad. However, if you’re four-foot-nothing then the handle is much closer to the ground, so the wheels lag a lot further behind. It’s a simple matter of trigonometry.
Put bluntly, a group of tiny tourists can clog up a tube station in seconds. If you really have to have one, please just hold it upright, or get a taxi.
Anecdote taken from EveryoneIs Entitled To My Opinion available from Amazon.
CabbieBlog 
Ironically I have just got home after 5 days in London wheeling around a small flight bag. Have you considered Gibbo that you might be the only person on the Planet who actually associates small flight bags with G-Strings. Nobody I know makes that connection. A few years back in Cornwall at the hotel gym I worked out at, one of the lockers in the locker room was permanently occupied & locked by an ‘anonymous’ gym member which was against the rules. Eventually the staff broke into the locker to discover it to be full of ladies lingerie, probably including G-Strings, plus some ownership ID docs.. [Pretty daft really.] The occupation of the MALE ‘miscreant’? A local taxi driver! If I say “I rest my case,” it is of course a small flight bag I am resting. Regards to you.
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As I understand it, many of those wheelie-case City people are not travelling anywhere. They use the cases to cart around their laptops and work papers, as well as the chargers, gym clothes, and associated gubbins.
Cheers, Pete.
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