What a go-bag is actually for

Search for a go-bag list and you will find hundreds, most of them longer than they need to be and several of them written by people selling the contents. The lists are not wrong, exactly. They are just answering a different question — what could conceivably be useful — rather than the one that matters, which is what a household will actually carry out of a door and use within three days.

This article works through a bag from that second angle. For each item: what it replaces, and whether it earns the weight.

The job the bag is doing

Write the job down and most of the arguments about contents answer themselves. The bag has to get one person through roughly three days away from home, starting at an hour when nothing is open, without needing a shop, a pharmacy or a favour.

Three consequences follow. It has to be grabbable, which means one hand and one movement, from a place you pass on the way out. It has to be carryable by the person it belongs to, up stairs, which rules out most of what people pack. And it has to survive being ignored for years, which rules out anything that leaks, melts or quietly expires without telling you.

That last point is the one that catches careful people. A bag packed beautifully in 2023 and never opened is not a packed bag; it is a bag of flat batteries and expired painkillers that you will trust at exactly the wrong moment.

The bag itself

A rucksack, because hands need to be free for a child, a carrier, a handrail or a door. Something in the region of twenty to thirty litres for an adult is enough for three days; a bag much larger invites you to fill it, and a full forty-litre bag is a bag somebody puts down halfway up a stairwell.

One per person who can carry one. Children from about school age can carry their own small bag with their own clothes and their own torch, and there is a second benefit to that: a child with a job and a bag is considerably calmer than a child with neither.

Nothing about the bag needs to be tactical, waterproof to a depth, or expensive. A school rucksack that is already in the cupboard is a better bag than the perfect one that is still in a browser tab.

Water, and why only the first day

Civil protection agencies in different countries converge on a few litres of water per person per day when they talk about supplies at home, counting drinking, cooking and basic washing. That is a sensible figure for a cupboard. It is a terrible figure for a bag: three days of water for a family weighs more than most adults can carry up a flight of stairs.

So the bag carries the first day — around two litres a person — and the plan carries the rest. Refill at the destination, at a tap, at a relative's kitchen sink. The purpose of the water in the bag is to cover the gap between leaving and arriving somewhere with plumbing, which is usually hours rather than days.

A small collapsible bottle is worth the space for the same reason: it weighs nothing empty and turns any working tap into a resupply.

Food that asks for nothing

The test for food in a bag is not calories. It is whether it needs anything: heat, water, a tin opener, a plate, a refrigerator, or a willing eater. Anything that needs one of those will not be eaten.

What passes: nuts, dried fruit, cereal bars, crackers, a jar of something sweet, the dull biscuits nobody fights over. What fails, despite appearing on every list: tins without a built-in opener, anything that needs boiling water, and the freeze-dried meals sold for camping, which are excellent in a tent and useless in a car park.

If anyone in the household has an allergy, a coeliac diagnosis or a restricted diet, the bag follows that diet. A stressful night is not the moment to find out that the only food available is the one that makes somebody ill.

Light, power and the cable problem

A torch with its own batteries, and a spare set taped to the body of the torch so the two never separate. Head torches are better than they look: they leave both hands free, which matters when you are carrying a bag and holding a child's hand.

Candles do not belong in a bag, and arguably not in the plan at all. Fire services report house fires started by candles with grim regularity, usually in exactly the circumstances where people reach for them — a dark room, a tired household, something flammable nearby.

Then the part that fails most often: the power bank and the cable. A power bank that has sat in a bag for a year is close to empty. Charge it when you check the bag, and buy a cheap second cable that lives in the bag permanently rather than the good one that lives behind the sofa. One cable per phone type in the household, because the night you leave is not the night to discover that nobody has the right end.

Clothes, and the extra layer

One change of clothes, shoes you can walk a few kilometres in, and one more warm layer than the weather suggests. Being cold is the most common complaint from people who have spent a night somewhere unplanned, and it is the easiest to prevent.

A thin waterproof jacket folds to nothing and solves rain, wind and standing outside for an hour. Spare socks are worth more than their volume. Nightwear is optional; dignity at three in the morning is not nothing.

Children's clothes are the item that silently expires. Twice a year, hold the spare set against the child.

Washing, and the small indignities

Soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a small towel, any sanitary items needed by anyone in the household, nappies and wipes if that applies, and a roll of toilet paper with the cardboard tube removed so it packs flat.

None of this is dramatic and all of it is what people remember. A shelter, a sports hall or a relative's spare room may have none of it at the hour you arrive.

First aid, and the limits of it

A small kit: plasters, a bandage, tape, antiseptic wipes, tweezers, scissors, gloves, and the painkillers your household normally uses. The point is minor injuries — the cut hand, the blister, the headache — not trauma care.

What the bag can hold without any professional involvement is the written list: every medication, its dose and the strength on the box, allergies, and the treating doctor's name. On paper, in the bag, and a second copy with the documents.

Money and numbers

Some cash, in small notes. Card payments need power at the till and a network between the till and the bank, and the area you are leaving may have neither. Small notes because change is the first thing a small shop runs out of.

And the numbers on paper: family, two destinations, the insurer's claims line, the vet, the landlord or building manager, the school. The phone that holds all of this is the single most likely thing to fail, and a borrowed phone is no use without the numbers.

The four things almost everyone packs and nobody uses

• A large knife. It is heavy, it worries people, and the job it does in three days away from home is done by a pair of scissors.
• A water filter. Excellent on a trail. In a three-day departure to a relative or a shelter, you are drinking tap water.
• A hand-crank radio with eleven functions. The radio part is genuinely useful when networks are down; the eleven functions are weight. A small battery radio does the same job.
• A second full set of everything. Redundancy feels prudent and reads as a bag nobody carries. One of each, checked, beats two of each, abandoned on the stairs.

What not to do

• Do not store the bag where you cannot reach it in one movement. A loft, a locked cellar or the back of a wardrobe turns the bag into a search.
• Do not pack anything that burns fuel to run indoors. Camping stoves, grills and generators produce carbon monoxide, which cannot be seen or smelled, and health authorities consistently warn that it causes deaths. Wherever you end up, that rule does not change.
• Do not pack and forget. An unchecked bag is a bag of assumptions. Two dates a year.
• Do not let the bag replace the plan. A perfect bag and no agreed destination is worse than a mediocre bag and two phone numbers.
• Do not go back into a building for a bag. It is a bag. The most consistent warning in official fire safety material is about going back in, and it is consistent because people keep doing it.

Questions

In short

A bag that gets packed, kept somewhere sensible and checked twice a year beats a better bag that does not exist. Start with water for a day, food that needs nothing, a torch, a charged power bank with its own cable, a change of clothes, soap, cash and the numbers on paper. Add the medication list. Then stop, and spend the remaining effort on the documents and on deciding where you would go, which are the two parts of this that cost nothing and are skipped most often.

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