OK, this has been bugging me for ages now, but the camel's back was broken yesterday and I have to post! (Please understand that this is not some attempt to convince you all that I lead some sort of glamorous life - it is usually stressful, extremely tiring and very unpredictable).

Anyway, yesterday I was in the (London) house of a very famous musician I am working with at the moment. I was making us some coffee in his basement kitchen, and when I went in search of spoons I was not so amazed to find that many of these spoons had been nicked from the front cabins of commercial airlines. There were little teaspoons from IB, LH, BA, the old Swissair, Egyptair, VS... the list goes on. Saucers were also sauced (sic) from a number of airlines!

Why wasn't I surprised? Well I've seen this before, in the home of an actress you would all be pretty familiar with, who I found has a particular penchant for the BA CE old black and white, and many of the newer colour coffee / tea cups! She was also very proud to show me a (rather attractive) blue and red VS teapot. I've also come across a collection of airline bits in the flat of a well-known composer.

In the latter case I looked underneath some coffee cups hanging on some nails in his kitchen and they were all old BA designs which, when I asked him, he admitted (with a laugh) he had nicked from Concorde over the years.

And it's not restricted to entertainers! I also know a widely respected, and hugely published intellectual in Italy in whose kitchen I found any number of (largely Alitalia) plates and other items of airline crockery.

Now clearly none of these people lack money. What links them appears to be this fetish for nicking airline cutlery and crockery.

Why?

Do any of you do this? Have you ever been tempted? Can someone please explain this pattern of odd behaviour and perhaps why it appears to unite celebrities? Have you encountered anything similar in someone's house? Have any of the cabin crew who post on this board ever seen passengers hauling off bags of cups and plates? If they saw one of these famous people doing it (and two of them at least are very recognisable) what would they say?

None of the non-famous people I know have ever indulged in this odd form of collecting... (to my knowledge anyway!)

OK, so I confess noting the all-white tea service in F on QF recently which I found very attractive... but I didn't slip the whole lot into my carry-on! That just feels like a very strange thing to do, quite apart from the illegality of it and the inconvenience of it clanking around!

OK, so at least it's off my chest now. Have a nice day.
HL