Toby Young’s Status Anxiety
I’m a pack rat. I can’t bring myself to throw anything away. When Caroline first moved in with me she couldn’t get from one end of our bedroom to the other because every inch of floor space was taken up with piles of old newspapers and magazines. I have lock-ups full of stuff, some of them in New York. At one point, I asked a friend if I could use the space under his stairs to store a cache of second-hand coats I’d bought at a jumble sale. When I wanted to retrieve one five years later, he gave me a blank look and told me he’d moved two years earlier. I haven’t spoken to him since.
Our present house is blessed with two large attics — or ‘storage spaces’, as I prefer to call them. (It was one of the reasons I bought it.) As you can imagine, they are stuffed to the gills with junk and a couple of weeks ago Caroline announced that she wanted me to clear one of them out so the children could use it as a ‘den’.
‘But what shall I do with all my stuff?’
‘Throw it away,’ she said.
‘Are you mad? There are heirlooms up there — some of them worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.’
‘In that case, why not sell them?’
With great reluctance, I agreed to a car boot sale and on Sunday we drove to a playground in Battersea and I set out my wares. Pride of place was given to an antique lamp that I’d inherited from my maternal grandmother.
‘’Ow much d’you want for that?’ asked a middle-aged man in a sheepskin coat.
‘I can see you’ve got a good eye,’ I said. ‘That’s a very valuable piece.’
‘I’ll give you fifty pee for it,’ he said.
‘FIFTY PEE?’
‘We’ll take it,’ said Caroline.
Seconds later, Granny Ann’s bedside light was gone. I couldn’t believe it. I told Caroline that Arthur Daley had got the bargain of the century. There was just no way it was worth so little.
‘Go and have a look around,’ she said. ‘You’ll quickly discover that fifty pee is the going rate for an old lamp.’
I followed her advice and it wasn’t long before I came across our friend in the sheepskin coat. He was standing behind a trestle table with his wares laid out in front of him. Slap-bang in the centre was my grandmother’s antique lamp.
‘Hang on a minute,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were a stallholder.’
‘Oh, yeah. Been coming here for years.’
‘How much are you asking for my lamp?’
‘Five pound.’
‘Five pounds?!? But I just sold it to you for fifty pee.’
‘No law against making a profit is there?’
He explained that he always made a point of getting to the car boot sale early and combing the stalls for bargains that he could then sell for a mark-up. It was how he made his money. He pointed out that they still hadn’t let in members of the public. All the people buying and selling at this point were other stallholders, hoping to turn a quick profit. When you paid for a pitch, you weren’t just paying for the opportunity to sell, but to be allowed in early so you could get first pick of the merchandise.
I ran back to my stall where I’d left Caroline in charge. Clearly, the right strategy was not to sell anything until the public had been let in. Too late. By the time I got there she’d sold everything apart from four exercise DVDs.
‘How much did you make?’ I asked.
She counted up the money in her pocket.
‘Twenty-seven pounds fifty.’
I was crestfallen. I recalled all the years I’d spent lugging this stuff from house to house — in some cases, country to country. I’d thought nothing of hiring removal companies to pack it up into boxes and ship it overseas. Twenty-seven pounds fifty would barely cover the cost of one box.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘Nowhere,’ I said. ‘I just want to check something.’
Seconds later I was standing in front of Arthur Daley again.
‘I’ll give you two pounds for it,’ I whispered.
‘Four quid and it’s yours,’ he said.
We settled on three pounds fifty.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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