How to nab a vintage bargain for your home at an auction 

Kya deLongchamps shares her advice on raising our bid and encourages us to attend at least one in-person event this winter

You must view auction items, writes Kya deLongchamps. If you’re spending a significant amount of money, ensure you get to see the lot in person. File picture

Even with the floor weeded by the growing audience of remote bidders, there’s a real sense of period drama about a terrestrial antiques auction, and it’s not just the lots. The eclectic mixture of stuff with its accrued history, lifted from a hairy furni-print, waits patiently for new, more interested fingers to trace its old surfaces. The oily sideways glances and strangled whispers between collector couples juicing the air. Single viewers slide shoulder-fore through the narrow canyons of brown furniture. We make mannerly, melodic mumbles of apology as tables studded with valuable smalls, wobble uncertainly on collision.

I have my own furtive (and quite obvious) little polka. I make slow, furtive cyclical expeditions, ignoring my star-lot on the first circuit. I am inwardly trembling, a taut old heron stalking a silvery bream.