Its shopping not work
It’s Shopping, Not Work
People sometimes ask me what it is like being an antiques dealer.
The honest answer is that I am not entirely sure I would describe it as work.
Shopping, perhaps.
I spend an extraordinary amount of my life wandering around antique shops, antiques centres, auction houses, markets, fairs and the occasional slightly alarming shed at the bottom of someone's garden. I travel to places I might otherwise never have visited, because somebody, somewhere, has told me there are things worth looking at.
And, of course, I look.
That is the important bit.
You never quite know what you are going to find. One day it might be a painting you have been searching for years. The next, a little object that you have never seen before but immediately decide you cannot possibly live without.
So you buy it.
And this is where the job becomes particularly dangerous.
Because, unlike most people who go shopping, an antiques dealer can actually justify the purchase.
"I like it," is usually a perfectly good reason.
"I think it is beautiful," is another.
And if you are feeling particularly responsible, you can always tell yourself that you are buying it for the business.
Sometimes that is even true.
The trouble is that antiques have a habit of becoming your own. You buy something intending to sell it, bring it home, find somewhere to put it, and then spend the next six months looking at it and thinking how marvellous it is.
Eventually, somebody asks if it is for sale.
You hesitate.
"Well... technically."
That is the great joy of dealing in antiques. You are surrounded by things with histories. Things that have survived generations, fashions, wars, house clearances, moves, neglect and, occasionally, the terrifying attentions of previous owners with tins of paint.
You get to handle them, research them, live with them and, if you are lucky, find the next person who will love them as much as you did.
And the shopping never really stops.
You can be driving through a town you have never visited before and spot an antiques centre. You can be on holiday and find yourself walking into a little shop because something in the window caught your eye. You can go to a market with absolutely no intention of buying anything and come home with three things you didn't know existed that morning.
That is not a bad way to earn a living.
Of course, there is a serious side to it. You have to know what you are buying. You have to understand prices, condition, provenance and, increasingly, the difference between something genuinely interesting and something that merely looks good in a photograph.
You have to buy well.
You have to sell well.
And occasionally you have to admit that the wonderful bargain you thought you had discovered was, in fact, not quite as wonderful as you first imagined.
But even then, you are still out there looking.
Still shopping.
Still finding things.
And that is why, after all these years, I still think of being an antiques dealer as one of the best jobs in the world.
Because at the end of the day, if someone asks me what I did today, I can usually say:
"I went shopping."
And, somehow, I got paid for it.
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