Inauspicious beginnings. “He’s so wee, he’ll nae live” pronounced Hughie, a former Scottish Coal Miner who had lodged in the small upstairs bedroom of my grandparents terraced house for so many years, decades, that he had become family, when he first saw me.

He was going to be proved wildly inaccurate on both counts.

At the time I weighed very little indeed, being premature. Accounts vary but it’s something between three and five pounds. That made me worth about six hundred pounds in scrap silver (at today’s prices) and in my parents place I would have cashed me in straight away.

No matter what Tom Sawyer may say, childhoods are dull affairs, doubly so when they are somebody else’s, so let’s skip it. The highlights were nearly dying on a pedalo in Menorca, nearly dying walking down Spaghetti Junction in the snow, nearly dying walking with Dad along disused sections of the Birmingham canal network. Not one to spoil an ending, but on each occasion I survived, by luck, not judgement. Then something far more dangerous happened to me, I was accidentally introduced to the world of Antiques.

This then is not my life story, nobody wants that. This is the story, or more correctly stories, of when my life collided with that wonderful, exotic, enticing, confusing, corrupting and out and out bewildering world of Antiques.

The heroes, the crooks, the fools, the liars, the villains, the artists, the piss artists, the wealthy, the poor and the poor bastards. The whole beautifully filthy glorious heaving lot of it. The only thing to add is this, every single word of it happened, every single word of it is TRUE.