Even though I fly a lot, I retain the notion that air travel should be treated as a special occasion for which one should dress accordingly.

Back in the day, if you showed up looking as though you’d made a bit of a sartorial effort, the check-in person might pick up the phone, announce to reservations that a Mr Sutherland was ‘SFU’, and would rip up your boarding pass to replace it with a nicer one. In airline argot, SFU stood for ‘Suitable for Upgrade’.

Now that upgrades almost never happen, it won’t be long before people start turning up in dressing gowns. And, though I hate to say it, one of the best tips for modern airline travel is to wear naff clothes. Stout brogues and other leather-soled shoes have a metal bar between the sole and heel which sets off metal detectors – and they are lethal on wet tiled floors.

Likewise, gauche elastic-waisted trousers are much comfier for travel, especially if you have to sleep. Lastly, while in breach of all accepted dress codes landside, a shirt with a breast pocket is a must. Ergonomically, the male shirt pocket is the only one which can easily be reached with either hand. Hence if you are carrying luggage, but repeatedly need to retrieve passports or tickets, this is the only pocket which works – at least for any of the 194 nationalities whose levels of self-awareness and shame are sufficiently high to prevent them wearing what Americans call fanny-packs (bum-bags).

I’ve also given up on fancy luggage. In fact I am writing this from Gatwick accompanied by a small laptop bag and one of those canvas bags you get for a fiver at Sainsbury’s. I have blown more than £1,000 in the past decade being seduced by high-end carry-on luggage with multiple compartments for every conceivable appliance. And they would be wonderful, too, if only I could remember in which of the 47 sections I’ve put the damn thing I’m looking for. With the Sainsbury’s bag you simply delve in and root around; with the £500 Tumi bag, the mere act of retrieving a USB cable requires you to contend with so many pouches, zips, belts, buckles and straps, it’s like making love to a goth.

Fortunately, I have recently discovered a few things which make travel easier. One is the GaN charger, which uses gallium nitride, not silicon, for some critical function or other. This makes it much smaller and much more powerful – and the same tiny charger can be used for laptops, mobile phones and tablets. You can find these by searching for GaN chargers on Amazon. While there, you may also like to buy the world’s most obscure charging cable. This is a USB-to-electric-razor cable. The shaver socket is a disappearing format in bathrooms everywhere, and so this might be a godsend.

My final recommendation is a bit odd, but may be useful for anyone whose ears don’t work with ear-pods. When I had Covid before Christmas, I am convinced I read an online article in which a retired Labour politician (Ed Balls? Jack Straw?) enthused about bone-conducting headphones. Once recovered, I was unable to find this article and now believe I may have hallucinated the whole thing, but I bought some anyway.

Like everything else today, they are marketed at the young and active, and indeed joggers and cyclists do benefit from them for the simple reason that, since they do not obstruct the ear but sit on the cheekbones, they do not cause you to lose all spatial awareness and end up under a bus. But the original technology was developed for the elderly and the deaf. If you hate in-ear pods as I do, don’t want to walk around looking like Princess Leia, or are deaf, you might find these do the trick. A bit sub-par for listening to music, but perfect for audiobooks and podcasts.