I play in a session where one regular brings an extraordinarily crap guitar. It's a twelve-string with most of the courses reduced to single and most of them years old. I can't imagine anybody who would give a fiver for it in a jumble sale. He's got a good one at home but I've never seen it.

He's sitting at a table with other people who have minimally a few hundred pounds worth of kit in use, some a lot more, and none of the rest of us seem to have a problem with the risks. I find his behaviour condescendingly arrogant - "you lot aren't worth me risking my good axe for".

I don't get why people don't use stands. You can put almost anything on a stand to reduce the risk of it being knocked over, and most of them are neither heavy nor expensive. A simple one that will work for any table-high stringed instrument is two heavy spring clips (the sort used for DIY jobs) connected by a length of elastic; clip it on the edge of a table with the elastic round the neck and the soundbox resting on the floor. Total cost about two pounds. Instead of something like that you see fiddles balanced edgewise on ledges, guitars sitting on chairs with the pegbox hanging over the back where anyone could bump it, flutes on tables where they could roll off if anybody stood up in a hurry.