When stock quietly stops being stock.
There is a small lie I suspect most antiques dealers tell themselves.
Everything is stock.
Stock sounds professional. Stock has margins, turnover and inventory numbers. Stock is purchased with the clear-headed intention of being photographed, listed, sold and sent off to its new home.
Stock certainly doesn't sit on your mantelpiece for three years because you've become emotionally attached to it.
And yet, every so often, something comes home with me and simply never makes it any further.
At first, there's usually an excuse.
It needs researching.
I'll photograph it next week.
I'm just going to enjoy it for a little while first.
Then six months later you're dusting it.
Congratulations. You are no longer dealing in antiques. You are hoarding with paperwork.
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The Pretty Fish
Then there's the fish.
He's a Spanish studio pottery plate by Puigdemont, and he lives on a shelf in my bedroom amongst a growing collection of brown pottery that is absolutely, categorically, not stock.
One of the things that amused me when I first researched these plates was discovering that their desirability can apparently come down, at least partly, to the attractiveness of the fish.
Which seems rather unfair on the less genetically blessed examples, but there we are.
I reckon I got quite a pretty one.
As fish go.
He's gloriously mid-century: hand-painted, slightly eccentric and just odd enough to make me smile whenever I look at him. So naturally, he never made it anywhere near the shop.
Of course, being an antiques dealer means keeping one thing is rarely the end of the story.
Some time later, at Robin's Nest Emporium, I spotted two more. Smaller than mine, but in wonderful blues and greens — perhaps even more interesting, and perfectly mid-century craft.
I picked them up. I looked at them.
I put them back.
I am still kicking myself.
The sensible dealer in me had a perfectly good reason. Plates just don't sell like they used to. A few years ago, vintage and antique plates were amongst my biggest sellers. These days they can sit patiently waiting for somebody to love them while taking up increasingly valuable shelf space.
So I made the commercially responsible decision and left them behind.
Which would have been an excellent business decision had I actually wanted to sell them.
I didn't.
I wanted to put them next to the fish.
And therein lies one of the occupational hazards of dealing in antiques: sometimes the things you regret most aren't the things you bought.
They're the things you were sensible enough to leave behind.
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A Piece of Iceland
For a while, I developed a Saturday ritual.
There was a charity shop in Aldershot that seemed to have an inexplicable and apparently endless supply of extraordinary studio pottery. Every Saturday I'd go in, have a rummage and buy whatever caught my eye.
After a while, the ladies who worked there began to recognise me.
Sometimes I'd barely be through the door before one of them would call out:
“There's a lovely bit of brown pottery on the shelf for you, dear!”
They had me completely worked out.
And they weren't wrong.
Over the following months I steadily relieved them of their brown pottery problem and filled shelves both at home and at the Bourne Mill. There were hand-thrown pieces, strange glazes, makers I'd never heard of and mysterious marks that sent me disappearing down research rabbit holes for evenings at a time.
Then, quite by accident, I discovered where it had all been coming from.
I'd posted one of my mystery finds in the Facebook group British Studio Pottery Mystery Pots, hoping somebody might recognise the maker.
A woman contacted me.
She was the niece of a gentleman who had died in Reading, and she'd recognised the pottery. It had belonged to her uncle.
He had been an enormous collector.
There were hundreds of pieces throughout his house — in rooms, the attic, the garage and two outbuildings. His family had been slowly working their way through it all.
And, apparently, he had also been a dealer.
Ah.
Suddenly my Saturday pottery bonanza began to make rather more sense.
Perhaps I should have regarded his story as a cautionary tale. After all, here was a man who had spent years dealing in pottery while simultaneously accumulating hundreds of pieces of it throughout his house and assorted outbuildings.
Instead, I thought:
What an incredible collection.
Which probably tells you everything you need to know.
One piece I couldn't bring myself to sell was this extraordinary vase by Glit Pottery of Iceland.
What fascinated me was the volcanic material incorporated into its wonderfully brutal, crusty surface.
It's dark, heavy and frankly not going to win any prizes for delicacy. It looks slightly as though somebody has dragged a perfectly respectable vase through a lava field.
I absolutely love it.
Because sitting on a shelf in my house is an object containing a tiny physical piece of Iceland.
How was I supposed to sell that?
And so it joined the others.
Which, come to think of it, is probably exactly how the gentleman in Reading started.
The Elephant in the Room
Then there's my elephant.
Unlike some of my keepers, there's nothing particularly rare about him. He isn't terribly old and I see similar examples fairly regularly.
His value is almost entirely sentimental.
Although technically, I suppose, he belongs to my mother.
About ten years ago, when I was living in London, my best friend and I had one of our regular days out in Farnham.
We've been doing roughly the same thing for perhaps twenty years: start at the Packhouse, move on to the Antiques Warehouse, finish with a rummage around the Bourne Mill, then lunch and — importantly — a glass of wine.
Some traditions deserve protecting.
This particular trip was around Christmas and we were supposedly Christmas shopping.
At the Bourne Mill, I spotted an enormous ceramic elephant.
And stopped.
My friend noticed me staring at it.
“Do we need to talk about the elephant in the room?”
Apparently we did.
I decided it would make a brilliant Christmas present for my mum. I bought it, took it home...
...and never gave it to her.
I tried. I really did.
But somewhere between buying it and Christmas Day I made the unfortunate discovery that I liked my mother's present considerably more than I liked the idea of my mother owning it.
So the elephant stayed.
Ten years later, he lives in the fireplace in my bathroom, looking completely at home and showing absolutely no remorse about the whole affair.
Before anyone judges me too harshly, my mother does now have an elephant.
Admittedly, acquiring that one required Facebook Marketplace, my cousin collecting it on my behalf, storing it for two or three months and then waiting for my parents to visit so that an international-elephant-smuggling-level chain of custody could finally be completed.
But she got one.
Eventually.
Mine isn't especially valuable. It isn't particularly rare. There's no fascinating maker or unusual technique for me to hide behind as justification for keeping it.
I just love it.
And perhaps that's the point.
When you deal in old things, you become very good at explaining why something is interesting. The maker. The date. The rarity. The glaze. The provenance. The value.
But sometimes none of that matters.
Sometimes you keep something simply because, ten years later, you can look at a ridiculous ceramic elephant and remember exactly where you were, who you were with, what they said and how much you laughed.
Try putting a price on that.
Although, Mum, if you're reading this — technically, I suppose I already did.
One In, One Out. Sort Of.
There comes a point in every collector's life when somebody else in the house starts asking questions.
My long-suffering partner generally assumes that whatever comes through the front door is stock for resale.
I tend to smile and nod in a way that confirms absolutely nothing.
Some things I already know are staying.
The black panther was one of them.
I found him some time ago at a flea market in Brighton and knew exactly where he was going: on the mantelpiece in my bedroom, facing an odd black elephant bookend, with a pair of ebony barley-twist candlesticks behind them.
Perfect synergy.
The bedroom has quietly developed an animal theme over the years. Not leopard-print wallpaper and zebra carpet animal theme, I hasten to add.
It's much more subtle than that. Different countries, periods, materials and styles. You could quite easily walk into the room and not notice it.
At least, that's what I'm telling myself.
Anyway, I digress.
Last Sunday I cycled some new stock over to the Bourne Mill and spent a couple of hours rearranging, tidying and dusting my space.
I normally go on a Saturday, preferably when there's some other chore waiting at home so I can't linger too long.
This time, however, I had nowhere particularly pressing to be.
Dangerous.
So I decided to wander around the Mill as a customer for once.
And that's when I saw the leopards.
Two carved wooden leopards, wonderfully mid-century in feel, stalking along together.
I knew immediately that they were coming home with me.
I tried them on a bookshelf first.
They weren't right.
I moved them around.
Still not right.
After a couple of days, I realised what the problem was.
The panther was in their spot.
Now, there are rules about these things.
We have a one in, one out policy in our house. It's a very sensible arrangement designed to prevent my interest in antiques from gradually consuming every available horizontal surface.
So the panther is out.
And the two leopards are in.
Yes, I appreciate that's technically two in, one out, but let's not get bogged down in accounting.
The leopards now stalk across the bedroom mantelpiece, and that little flash of warm colour amongst all the dark wood is exactly what it needed.
My partner hasn't noticed them yet.
There is also one other, admittedly minor, administrative detail.
The panther hasn't actually left the house.
He's just...
out.
Conceptually.
And, for the more inquisitive amongst you, you may already have spotted him in the photograph at the beginning of this Journal.
Apparently, one in, one out doesn't necessarily mean out of the house. It can also mean upstairs and slightly to the left.
Whoops.
And perhaps that's the real problem with being an antiques dealer who also happens to love antiques.
There will always be another shelf. Another corner. Another object that needs “a little more research” before it can possibly be sold.
We tell ourselves they're stock.
We tell our partners they're stock.
Sometimes we may even put a price label on them.
But eventually you have to admit the truth.
Some of us aren't dealers with collections.
We're collectors with card machines.