Packing for a trip always seems to turn up the same handful of small annoyances, a shampoo bottle that leaks all over your clothes, earrings that end up hopelessly tangled, snacks that go stale halfway through a flight. Most travellers reach for a fresh set of gadgets or specialty pouches to solve these problems, when the fix has actually been sitting in the kitchen drawer all along. A roll of ordinary aluminium foil, thrown into a side pocket of your bag, turns out to solve a surprising number of travel headaches without adding any real weight or bulk. Here are five genuinely useful ways to put it to work on your next trip.