The most expensive sold at auction for over $6.5 million; around one trillion are taken every day thanks to the ubiquity of the Smart phone; nearly all of us have taken them and own them. Few things are familiar to the average person than the photograph.

They are windows on the past, and where they have been faithfully reproduced rather than tampered with, provide us with the earliest unfettered and unfiltered clues to how we once lived.

When it comes to collecting, I can’t think of another discipline that it is as accessible or fascinating to the masses.

Vernacular or street photography has long been popular, never more so since then discovery of the extraordinary archive left by the unknown Vivian Maier (1926-2009), an American nanny who pursued a secret career as a street photographer for 40 years and whose work can now sell for thousands. From Victorian cartes de visites to anonymous everyday subjects that sell on eBay for a few pounds, this is a craze that keeps growing and keeps on giving.

So it is with some excitement that original works by the father of modern photography Sir William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) come to auction at Sotheby’s in April.

Featuring people, objects and places, including his celebrated home, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, the images date back to the early 1840s and include one of Lady Elisabeth Feilding c.1841, who was born in 1773, three years before the American Revolution.

Photographs bring local history alive. Precious relics, they create a unique connection that never existed before Fox Talbot and his fellow pioneers worked out how to fix those images in permanent form.

If you’ve ever wondered how much money is spent on art, antiques and collectables around the world each year, we have just been told: $50 billion. That may sound a lot, but to put that in perspective, the annual spend of the entire global art market is less than the market capitalisation value of all top 16 companies in the FTSE 100.

The value of the annual global art market has risen to almost $68 billion before, but as with nearly all other forms of commerce, the pandemic has taken its toll. Nonetheless, as this column has noted in recent months, art and antiques auctions have entered a booming new era thanks to the rapid acceleration of adoption of online sales.

The $50 billion figure was announced in mid-March by Arts Economics, the research company behind the eagerly anticipated Art Basel report, the Rolls Royce annual assessment of the art market and what is happening to it.

One of the report’s headline claims that online-only sales at auction doubled in the past year. Another was that although UK sales as a whole fell by 22% to $9.9 billion, it still held on to its top-three spot after the US and China as the world’s most important market for art and antiques.

It’s reassuring to know that even in troubled times, the knowledge, skill and expertise of British art market professionals still shines through.

It’s tough time to be a politician wherever you are, what with the pandemic, increasingly polarised views and the perils of social media. Two recent and not altogether unconnected events remind me that political legacies can defy early reputations. As Churchill’s personal brandy glass and monogrammed slippers sold for a combined premium-inclusive £60,000 at auction the other day, the almost mythical status of our greatest ever wartime leader was set against the rather less generous views of Chips Channon, celebrated diarist of the 1920s and ’30s, whose journals have been republished in unredacted form for the first time.

Channon, a brilliant writer of sometimes dubious views – he thought Hitler marvellous and Churchill the most dangerous man in Europe – was an unparalleled observer of his times in terms of wit yet was almost invariably wrong about public figures, events and how everything would turn out. His career as an MP was certainly overshadowed by his writing, and a good thing too.

How different was the experience of the nation’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole, from the frenetic lives of 20^th century incumbents of that role. Walpole, who took office exactly 300 years ago on April 3, enjoyed an uninterrupted term in office of over 20 years – still the longest ministry of any PM. He is generally seen as one of the best political leaders we have ever had and navigated a careful course of moderation and tolerance to establish political and social stability. How different from the bearpit Commons that was to follow.

I never thought I’d see the day when serious money was bid for… well, nothing really! But in a way that is exactly what we have been seeing over the past few weeks with something called NFT and now with a Tweet.

Pulling value out of thin air really started when the digital space became sophisticated enough to mimic (to a degree) the real world. Most obviously, Bitcoin led the way here, and we now see single units changing hands for astronomical sums. But Bitcoin isn’t linked to any tangible asset, it’s really just an idea, or rather a common agreement that the idea has real value and creates a means of trading value. What happens when confidence wains? Does the house of cards come tumbling down?

NFT (Non Fungible Tokens) allow artists to sell a work of art in the digital space by issuing single units of digital code from hundreds of thousands that, placed together, make up the digital artwork. Controlled through blockchain – and so supposedly protected from fraud – it allows ordinary members of the public to invest modestly in extraordinary artworks at the highest level, while bringing the artist a large amount of money and a small commission on the resale of each NFT.

Again, though, to me what the buyer owns is little more than an idea.

Now we have news of the sale of the first Tweet ever posted by Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter. It’s 15 years old and reads: “just setting up my twttr.” No doubt it’s an historic post, and bidding has reached $600,000 for the NFT of its unique digital signature.

I’m sure it’s all very exciting but I can’t help feeling more comfortable with bids for a solid bit of oak or maybe a decent daub in a nice frame.