Possibly as a result of watching too much Cash in the Attic, Antiques Roadshowand Bargain HuntI've convinced myself that somewhere inside me is an expert on antiquity. I don't have any knowledge per se, but, as any collector will tell you, this game is all about instinct. Like I said to that chancer on Portobello Road last year, if that's Clarice Cliff then I'm a toby jug. I bought a genuine 1970s party receptacle instead. Genuinely horrible, genuinely unusable, but as genuinely 1970s as cheese-and-pineapple canapes. Those were the days.
So of course I couldn't just walk past the sign. It was advertising a house-contents auction, but not just any contents. Until recently the house belonged to some old family friends. Here was a chance to walk down a path into the past while pretending that I knew my astragal doors from my blind fretwork. A chance to reminisce about the generous measures of gin and tonic poured in that fine drawing room every Christmas morning while nodding knowingly at dusty credenzas and card tables.
I've found myself oddly drawn to stuff with a past recently. The Lowry print I picked up at an auction room at the beginning of the summer is a more successful case in point. I think it's a reaction to the fact that we've asked an architect, a master of minimalism, to do some work on our house. (Of course we are having work done on the house. An extension. What do you mean you haven't had an extension done yet? Don't you feel a bit left out? We did. For ages. That's why we're getting it done, obviously. Of course we've commissioned an eco-survey. Cheek.)
I'm not saying we're scared of the architect, exactly, but in my darkest hours I fear we'll end up living in a white box, a kind of semi-functional Turner installation with rubber walls and right angles everywhere. As a result I have an urge to collect lots of ancient things: a mangle, maybe, for the laundry room, a few dusty prints of men on horseback, perhaps a chaise longue or two, all to offset the inevitable light-box installation over the dining table.
Back at the contents auction, nobody seemed to be serving gin and tonics in the drawing room, so I grabbed a catalogue and got to work. There was a chaise longue in one of the bedrooms, as it happened. Victorian, I surmised at a glance, upholstered in blue with turned and bulbous mahogany legs circa 1860. I put a big tick beside that. Nothing else really excited us until we saw the cellarette. It looked like a bedside table, but then you opened it up and found compartments for wine. When we saw it we wondered how we had survived thus far in life without one. But even the George IV cellarette paled into insignificance compared to the writing desk. Looking at the desk - a Sheraton with tooled top raised on a satinwood cross-banded scriver, if you must know - it came to me: my writer's block was not, as I'd always suspected, down to my being the world's most dedicated procrastinator but merely stemmed from my lacking the correct furniture on which to write genre-busting, critic-astounding works of fiction/non-fiction. This desk would change everything. Many, many ticks were put beside it in the catalogue. It was as good as mine.
We retired across the road for lunch, and to talk strategy and work out the maximum we were willing to pay for the Iranian prayer rug, the cellarette, the chaise longue, the Queen Anne-style stool and, of course, the desk. After lunch I sat on a late-Victorian tub chair with spindle rails circa 1900 and waited for my lots to come up.
The rest is a bit of a blur. The auctioneer provided such good entertainment - "Next up, a really good hall runner. We all need a good hall runner. It's a really good runner" - that I got distracted, and before I knew it all my lots had been snapped up, and not by me. I do recall raising my paddle a couple of times during proceedings, when a feeling of panic took over that I was going to leave with nothing. It was not unlike the feeling I used to get in the bookie's when I'd keep piling money on the dogs in trap number one until eventually I won something.
I stay away from bookies these days, and now I think I should stay away from auctions. I apparently bid on a collection of miscellaneous leisure and other books that on inspection included works by Danielle Steel and Dan Brown. On the plus side, I went home with a silver tea service; specifically, a late-Victorian four-piece bright-cut plated tea service with fluted, engraved, banded decoration bone finials and lobed covers, which my architect will just love.
Róisín Ingle presents Weekend Blend at 10am every Saturday on Newstalk 106-108fm
