Sunday 28 June 2009

A mixed week

Ah collectors! We meet again!

A letter arrived on my doormats on Saturday last (is that right Saturday last? Last Saturday ) A letter from the electric people. A bill! For seventeen hundred pounds! I rang them immediately. What is this! I cried. Some mistake surely!

You see on the telly all the while tales of pensioners who are given bills that are wrong and the suffering it causes them. They are too afraid to complain. Well a man who has a barbed wire collection fears no electrician! Once you have accidently sat on a piece of razor wire in a cotton night gown you tend to realise that most other situations in life are not as bad as you might think! So I rang them up immediately (I think I may have already said that [in the last paragraph {I'll just check }])

We discussed my electrical uses of electricity. One small fridge (light not working). One oven (grill not used for safety reasons [mobile collection]) One black and white television. One VHS Video recording recorder. One clock radio. "Is that all Mr Badgerworth?" Oh yes and fourteen antique jukeboxes "Do you have them plugged in much Mr Badgerworth?" Oh of course. All the time! Don't you just love all those flashing lights?

Well apparantly antique jukeboxes use quite a lot of electricity. The bill was not sent in error. I needed seventeen hundred pounds. I would have to sell. gulp! A collection...

I decided to sell my stamp collection. I actually inherited a good part of it from two uncles and a grandmother so I don't really think of it as 'my' collection, although I have obviously, added to it over the years. So on Tuesday I hired a car, filled the boot, and drove to London to an auction house. The man who I saw said that it was too big a collection for him to sell and sent me in the direction of Sotheby's. Too big a collection! What an odd thought! Well the man at Sotheby's was very nice and asked if I could leave the collection with him while he had some people look at the stamps. He said it would take a few days but he would phone me and let me know if he considered it was worth selling as a job lot or splitting up the collection. I said that would be great as it would save me the price of a hotel! I was already pinning my hopes on getting seventeen hundred pounds for the stamps, I didn't need them to cover a night in a hotel too!

Well yesterday I got a call from the nice man at Sotheby's. He asked a few questions about where the stamps came from. Did I have American connections? Well yes, my Grandmother was born in America as was my Uncle. He came over during the war, married and settled down in Kent with my Aunt. Was I familiar with the stamp Benjamin Franklin Z Grill? Or the Treskilling Yellow? Or the Inverted Jenny? Or the...

No no I said! I am a collector not an expert! Why? Is it important I know these things? He replied "No sir. It is not important but I think that if you are not aware of these stamps and about three hundred others, or indeed their value, let alone the lesser, if still not inconsiderate, value of about nine thousand of the other stamps. Plus of course the accumulative values of what appear to be nearly one hundred thousand further stamps in total. As I say sir, if you are not aware then you may want to sit down." I sat down. He thought that by November they would have a catalogue for sale. November! I need to pay my bill by July the 21st! "If you would like to forward me the details of your electricity company sir it would be our privilidge to pay your bill for you as one of our most valued clients" Well that was nice wasn't it!

I was really worried about that money. The Sotheby's man told me I would never have to worry about money again. He said that they could not say for sure how much this collection was worth but that it would fetch, at the least, sixty million pounds.

Not really collectors! Ha Ha Ha Ha! No I was just watching Only Fools And Horses last night on UK Gold and thought you might like a little joke! I mean, my whole story was preposterous. Everyone knows antique jukeboxes don't consume that much electricity!

1 comment:

  1. But you really have antique jukeboxes? I hope so, that'd be awesome.

    ReplyDelete