About me: In the beginning…
It was all the BBC’s fault. My cousin John was coming to visit for a few days over Easter 2015, and in my usual role as Family Entertainments Manager, I was looking for things to do. I’d read in our local paper that the BBC television program Antiques Roadtrip was coming to a Littleton Auctions, just a couple of villages away. I’d always liked the idea of attending an auction and I knew John had been to a few so I suggested we go along to watch. If you live in a big, exciting city this might sound strange, but when you live in rural Worcestershire the filming of a television program is a big deal. We usually only get noticed when half the county is under flood water.
As it turned out, John hadn’t been to an auction for years although he had a large and growing collection of glass (and many other things as well) but he was a fan of Antiques Roadtrip and was happy to go along. Paul Laidlaw and Christina Trevanion were the stars of the day and in truth you couldn’t get two better ambassadors for the antiques and collecting business. With the combination of the buzz of the auction room (it’s always busy, but that morning it was packed), the fun of seeing the television crew in action and the amazing stuff being sold – I was hooked. I still am.
I’ve always liked museums. At a good auction viewing you can find yourself surrounded by much weird and wonderful stuff. Some of it looks like it should be in a museum along with a lot that probably would be better off in a skip, but it never ceases to entertain me.
In our early days my wife and I bought all sorts of eclectic things. I’m not sure I really needed a set of Post Office scales or a Chinese bamboo brush pot but they are things of beauty in their own very different ways. We realised over time that you could, for a modest amount of money, convert your house into large version of a Victorian Cabinet of Curiosities. Over time you learn to be a bit more selective though, if not you’ll eventually find you can’t get through the front door.
By spending time at auctions, in antique shops and at fairs you gradually learn some things provide an instant “Wow!” moment, some things grow on you over time and a lot leave you wondering what ever possessed the maker, or the original buyer. Walk into a modern shop and you’ll mostly see what’s popular today. Walk into an antiques shop or fair and you get to see what’s been popular over the last couple of centuries. Instead of being told what you should like, you get to decide from the all fashions stretching back to the industrial revolution and, if you’re lucky, beyond. The choice is so wide it’s bound to take time to choose what works for you and that, of course, is a large part of the pleasure.
About this blog
This blog is about giving me somewhere to express my interest in British art ceramics and glass, my efforts to see it, sometimes buying it and (occasionally) selling it. It’s a purely for interest and, at least for now, I’m avoiding anything that requires browser cookies unless you want to post comments and you choose to save your details locally. I’m not using the blog to make money so you can come and visit without being tracked or harassed by adverts.
I’d love to hear from anyone with an interest in what I’ve written, however anyone generating spam or being offensive will, of course, find their comments never being seen by anyone else. For now, at least, I’m using an approval process for comments. If the anti-spam filtering works then hopefully I can switch to an automatic approval process.
I hope to fully acknowledge people and businesses in my postings, but I’m not taking any form of commission so if I say I like someone, somewhere or something it’s because I do, not because I’m being paid to say so. I don’t want to offend anyone either so if your business gets a mention you don’t like, let me know and I’ll remove it. I won’t write about people or places I’m less keen on. Everyone out there trying to make a living from the antiques business has a hard enough time without negative comments from anonymous strangers. At the same time, if there’s an antiques business around the Cotswolds I haven’t mentioned it doesn’t mean I don’t like it – it probably just means I’ve not had time to visit (yet!).
A bit about the technology
This blog is a very new venture for me. For a living I worked with computer infrastructure so I’d installed and supported WordPress a couple of times, but never opened it up as a user. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what WordPress was or how complex it would be to get started. Mostly it seems very straightforward and is a very impressive bit of software, although it helps to understand about web and database servers, SSL certificates, networks and firewalls before you start! The bewildering part for me was trying to decide which of the huge range of add-ons are worth having and which destroy your site completely. I’ve learned the hard way that a good backup and recovery strategy is really important from the outset.
This blog is self-hosted, the only cost is the £10 a year I pay Cloudflare for the domain, everything else is basically free. As a Yorkshireman, this makes me very proud.
If you’re thinking of having a go at setting up WordPress yourself (either at home or by renting a hosted instance), the best bit of advice I’d give is to get your SSL certificate installed and working before you build any pages. Trying to retrofit an SSL certificate after you’ve started is difficult. Along with just about every other subject, the Web is full of people writing incorrect advice on how to fix up WordPress sites with a mix of encrypted and unencrypted pages because they tried to add an SSL certificate as an afterthought. From my experience it’s not worth the effort and in the long run it’s far better to get it right from the start and then watch out for unencrypted elements sneaking in and fix them (or remove them) straight away.