British Airways have stuck with the same basic formula for many years. Although, as we shall see, the bags have shrunk along the way.

The first exhibit features a classic British-size bag from the early 1980's. It has a logo in blue and red, and six drawings explaining the do's and don'ts of rubbish disposal. For some reason the bag has diagonal grey stripes all over it. All of these bags feature instructions on the rear printed in a staggering eleven different languages. The obvious candidate for our first cost-cutting measure is the grey stripes. However, the pictures on the next bag fail to reflect the loss of the stripes.

The mid-eighties introduced a serious downsizing of the bag and probably a change of manufacturer. But still we have the same six pictures. It would seem that these have been plagiarised as very similar drawings appear on the bags of several other airlines.

There were also some baffling minor alterations to the French and Spanish text on the back. Greater linguists than I will probably point out that the original had some ghastly grammatical errors although even I noticed that déchets had the accent over the wrong e.

Chinese pedants might also have noticed the implementation of extra punctuation.