Laura Craik on the Trunki and other suitcase dilemmas...

August. The annual family holiday. The big Samsonite was broken, so I had to stuff all 342 of my dresses into a too-small case. The seven-year-old packed her Trunki, which fits approximately one shoe. ‘No liquids — yours is a carry-on,’ I told the 11-year-old. ‘It certainly is,’ she humphed, removing her suntan lotion.

All kids take carry-ons, don’t they? Kids have few uses in life, but saving on baggage fees is one of them. EasyJet charges £45 to check in a bag at the gate; Ryanair charges up to £60. Yet a Ryanair executive recently had the temerity to criticise parents for ‘coming in with the kitchen sink’, saying he’d ‘seen two-year-olds wheeling a bag up to the plane as people try to take advantage’. Take advantage of what? Airlines’ cynical attempts to cash in on the perfectly normal procedure of having to travel with a suitcase? If you charge people extra for baggage, do you expect them to lie down and take it, or strap up their toddler like a pack mule?

Even once you’ve sold a kidney for the privilege of putting two cases in the hold, there’s the stress of whether it will make it out on to the luggage carousel. Away, a new brand featuring Tile luggage tags, allows you to track your case via an app, wherever it might have strayed. Designed by two women (and tested by being thrown out of a three-storey window in New York), the cases also feature ‘magic’ compression pads that allow you to pack at least 20 per cent more stuff, while the carry-ons come with in-built chargers. They’re already a celebrity fave. If a model as tall and bounteously dressed as Karlie Kloss manages to fit her wardrobe in them, I can probably fit in my Zara clothes. Especially if I make the kids carry all my shoes on to the plane.

Thor blimey, Cate

Some critics are calling her ‘the best Marvel villain ever’ — high praise — but we won’t get to see Cate Blanchett as Hela, goddess of death, until October, when Thor: Ragnarok gets its UK release. That it comes out on the same date as season two of Stranger Things amounts to more death and excitement than anyone can handle in a day. In a recent interview, inevitably, Cate (left) was asked about her exercise routine — rigorous on account of the unforgiving skin-tight suit her character had to wear and which she called ‘horrendous’, adding: ‘I get in shape, then I’m back to eating hamburgers.’ Thanks, Cate, for neatly summing up every woman’s attitude to exercise when the summer holiday season judders to an end. Bring on the burgers.

Word up

My eldest left primary school the other week. All the year-sixes came out with their shirts covered in messages, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the playground. To be fair, the stuff they wrote was a shade more imaginative than the graffiti being scrawled all over trainers this season. Some might say £586 is a bit steep for a pair of Reebok Instapumps (below) that say ‘I’m bored’ and ‘so good’, yet being a Vetements collab, it sold out straight away. The new Adidas Stan Smiths (above), meanwhile, bear the legends ‘nobody is perfect’ and ‘yes I’m crazy’, along with 1980s-style paint splodges and will set you back £257. Stephen Sprouse did it so much better: if you’re lucky enough to own anything from his 2001 collaboration with Louis Vuitton (or the rehash in 2009), now’s the time to dig it out again. If not, get creative with the permanent markers and do it yourself.