www.silverguide.site –

If, a few years ago, someone told me that I would spend most of my 2026 scanning hundreds of airline sick bags, I would have wondered what had gone wrong with my life. Especially if you also told me I’d become a keen enthusiast for the beauty of their designs. But, as it turns out, making my new book Sicko has been one of the most joyful projects I’ve ever done.

It all began in 2023, when I met Trevor Cunningham. Back then I was making a film about his support group called Ask Trev – a free advice and guidance service staffed entirely by people called Trevor (there’s an astonishing 140 of them contributing to what he calls “a Trevorlution”).

While eating copious ice-cream cones (his favourite snack) during filming breaks, Trevor casually showed me random items around his house. At one point he pulled out a large binder stuffed with airline sick bags – a collection that had taken 37 years to amass. He seemed unaware of how interesting I’d find it.

What was the story behind it? Trevor relayed how, in 1989, his 32-year-old boss, Peter, had tragically died at work from a brain aneurysm. At the time Trevor was working around the world as an engineer who installed and fixed paper mills. He was assigned the job of clearing Peter’s office where, deep in a drawer, he found a collection of airline sick bags from all the flights he had been on. Trevor decided to carry on the collection in Peter’s honour. He now has more than 150, including many from airlines that don’t exist any more, such as Dragonair, Air Berlin and Varig.

Trevor told me about many of his hobbies – standup comedy, skydiving, a ukulele band – as well as his strange collection of dog statues in the shape of balloons. What I couldn’t get out of my head, though, was the sick bags.

And so I arranged to travel to his home in Torquay to make Sicko, a kind of diary via sick bags. The process was simple, I’d hold up a bag while asking him when and where he got it and naturally the floodgates for anecdotes and forgotten memories opened. He beamed as he recalled stewardesses falling flat on their behinds during turbulence, not being able to see fellow passengers due to the amount of cigarette smoke and the first time he saw dog on the menu in 1991 after a flight with Shandong Airlines to Jinan City.

Trevor started to write down these memories, which feature alongside each bag in the book. Some of them stuck with me. In 2016, he flew to Mumbai from Amsterdam for an engineering and design visit. He went to look at a new factory being built in Bhuj, India and saw welders on the site using Coke bottles as eye shields. One of the workers was leaning against a metal frame near a welder who hadn’t earthed his equipment properly. Trevor remembers a flash as the worker died via electrocution right in front of him.

The flight to New Deli from Mumbai airport was also the place that Trevor says he went through at least 20 sick bags after drinking unsanitary water. “By the time the flight took off I’d started vomiting. And it wouldn’t stop. People were passing sick bags forward like buckets of rubble after an earthquake.”

Sometimes I wonder how I managed to get Trevor to concentrate enough to finish the book. During the process, he sulked like a teenager being made to do homework, drinking endless 0% beers and proclaiming he was bored at least every 20 minutes. He fine tuned the art of procrastination, offering me endless cups of tea or changing the radio as an excuse to leave the table and stop writing. At one point, he asked if I was squeamish to which I replied no. He took this as confirmation to proceed in telling me he had purchased a “special kit” in order to burn off a skin tag under his armpit. He then asked me if we could pause our work, so that I could help burn it off as no one else would. Afterwards, the room stank of burning flesh and we had to open a window.

I decided to self publish the book, fearing that no one else would share my enthusiasm for these bags. But the 10 copies I printed – each wrapped in a neon yellow biohazard waste bag – sold out on the first day. So I went into print again, buzzing at the prospect that others also wanted to celebrate Trevor’s tribute to his boss Peter. For me, the book is a celebration of cherished collections, the people behind them and a chance to encourage people to look at the mundane a little bit differently.

• Sicko is available via Elizabeth McCafferty’s website and selected bookshops in London