I HAVE been following with interest the adventures of Cherie Blair on the auction site eBay, though a couple of things puzzle me. The first is the strange, car-boot-sale nature of the stuff she has been buying — the cheap and nasty shoes, in particular. (My obsession with thrift shopping runs out abruptly where shoes are concerned. I don’t think even a pair of second-hand Blahniks, not that I’ve ever seen such a thing, would appeal to me.)
The other thing I don’t get is how she and the rest of the celebrity eBay shoppers can bring themselves to buy stuff without having seen it. For me, the experience of shopping is largely tactile. If I can’t handle the goods — feel the texture of the fabric, inspect the seams and see the colour for real, rather than an approximation of it on screen or in a photograph — I’m not interested.
The result of all this is that I never fancy buying from mail-order catalogues, however tempting the goods. I did startle myself a bit earlier this season by buying a skirt from the Boden catalogue, but it wasn’t sight unseen: I’d seen it covering the rump of a girl sashaying up the King’s Road and although I didn’t quite get to inspect the hem allowance, I had a fair idea of the general effect.
Anyway, back to eBay, whose devotees apparently become quite addicted to the experience of shopping there, and engage in all sorts of ritualised behaviour. This is an aspect of buying at auction that I can easily understand, because I have lately become a bit of an auction junkie myself.
It began when I said to a friend that I was looking for a bookcase for Alexander, whose room suffers from the plague of books that afflicts the whole house. I knew what I wanted. It had to be smallish, pretty, made of solid oak and dirt cheap.
Advertisement
Easy, said the friend. You go to the Greenwich auctions. These take place in a large warehouse, just around the corner from my house. Viewing is on Fridays and the goods consist of the most amazing collection of junk, from the faintly sinister (sad old furs with dull glass eyes and pathetic mummified paws) to the distinctly melancholy (abandoned photograph albums, captioned in neat white writing on black sugar-paper. “Self in Cairo” said one I was looking at last week, beneath a picture of a stringy chap in shorts. And of course you cannot forbear to wonder who “self” is, and what has happened that his photographs should be lying in the heap of assorted umbrellas and cruet stands that make up Lot 126).
Mixed up with the broken writing slopes and stringless violins is a fair amount of useful stuff including, recently, a bookcase which was exactly what I wanted. I left a bid for the reserve price and a couple of days later found that it was mine. Rather thrilled with the success of this form of shopping, I did it again last week. Only this time, there came no Monday-morning phone call to say that I had been successful. Neither the Gothic side table, the cast-iron birdbath nor the mismatched 1950s tea service would be embellishing my house.
I had thought when I left my bids that I didn’t really mind whether I was successful. But now I find that bird-bath is preying on my mind. Since I wasn’t there, I have no idea how the bidding went, and the thought that another fiver might have secured it is tantalising. So next time I fancy bidding for something, I suppose I shall have to do it in person.
After that, who knows how it will all end — with a houseful of broken davenports and abandoned photo albums, most likely. Though it is a comforting thought that if I grow tired of the stuff, Greenwich auctions will simply come and take it all away again.
Advertisement
JANE SHILLING