Vintage view: fun auctions

Kya deLongchamps describes the highs and lows of the only game in town — the auction.

There’s a firm period drama about any antique auction that stirs those fine hairs at the nape of the neck. The eclectic mixture of lots with their accrued history, evicted from decades of intimate domestic service, waiting hushed in the dusty half light of a community hall.

The oily sideways glances and strangled whispers juicing the air; the more generous bottomed, forced to slide shoulder-fore through the narrow canyons of brown furniture, exchanging incoherent mumbles of apology as tables studded with valuable smalls, wobble uncertainly.