Mixed Lot

There is a saying in the SAS - train hard, fight easy - a motto that is similar to the one in the antique trade - buy hard, sell easy. In other words; it's easy to sell if you buy the right thing at the right price. That may sound obvious, but it's a lot easier said than done.

It's a lot easier said than done because it's a bit like trying to find a fish in the River Thames - nigh on impossible. Where once the waters were teeming with fat juicy aquatic vertebrate, too many fishermen have tipped the balance and as a result the nets return less and less profit.

Forget what you see on the Antiques Roadshow because a) those so-called experts are actually just cravat-wearing toffs who have never ever managed to buy or sell anything in their lives (but are very good at valuing things for a percentage) and b) it's television. In truth, it is fiction that someone happens upon an 18th Century tantalus at a car boot sale for 50p before selling at Christies for £5,000.

Most antique dealers survive on small gains - one told me yesterday (at The Cloisters Fair) that he bought a Victorian gold sovereign for £170 because he knew someone who would give him £175. That is the reality - our money has to work harder than ever if we are to survive the chill of economic downturn. To make matters worse, some things that once had value now have no value at all. There is an argument for putting that Victorian china tea service in the attic until the market swings back in its favour (it won't by the way) but equally you could just chuck it in the landfill now.

It used to be easy in our game - buy a plate for £3 at auction and sell it to an American or a self-made Cockney retiring to the North Norfolk coast (also known as a gullible punters) for £30. It was like plucking apples from an orchard on a late summer evening - easy, with the promise of pie later. The harvest provided for us all. Not now though. Now we wander aimlessly around the car boot sales like a displaced Somali tribesman searching for food. We are no longer fat, we are hungry. So when the opportunity to eat arises, we eat. We eat little and often because the feasts are few and far between.

Which is exactly why I don't bother looking any more. The hounds can chase the fox as far as I am concerned. Such kills do not warrant the energy expended. I'd rather sit in the pub with my antique dealer chums and share a glass or two of shandy than enter the ruck and risk my eyeballs being gouged out by some over zealous middle-aged woman who thinks that ten years of watching Bargain Hunt has provided her with the skills and experience necessary to make it in the trade (actually, her garage is just full of the shit she has bought and can't sell - it will stay there until she pops her clogs and it's taken away by the house clearance boys). I prefer the life of a Gentleman Dealer - let's just sit back and think of England. Let the hoi polloi fight it out. Let's wait until the rabbit comes to us. In the meantime, relax and enjoy.

Which is exactly what happened yesterday, at The Cloisters Fair. Roger Bell's excellent Fleamarket (a proper Fleamarket as opposed to a market full of fleas) was on in the main hall. Sometimes our events coincide and when they do we shake hands and share the spoils (he's a decent chap - rare in our business). A woman entered the Fleamarket with a gem in her pocket - a gem she hoped to sell. Her route to me (in the adjoining hall) would take her past every single hungry antique dealer in St Andrew's Hall (maybe 100 traders). If she were a fish she would have been a bloody big fat juicy salmon and her route to me was one fish-trap, net, and handline after another. Somehow, however (and it must have been a miracle - I was looking around for a tall fella with a beard and some loaves of bread) she swam to me on the farthest side of the riverbank. Imagine my surprise, having been staring at sticklebacks all day, to see this wonderful thing upon my hook. Of course, the bait was thrown into the water from my own wallet but as my friend and colleague, Daniel, says 'You have to speculate to accumulate'.

Of course, I now have the task of selling 'it' - I can't tell you what 'it' is of course, because a Gentleman never tells. But I can tell you that selling it will be easy, because selling is easy when you buy well.