The four Ds that lead to items being sold at auction are Death, Divorce, Debt and Decluttering. After what we have all been through since March, I suspect that Debt will be the prompt for a whole new slew of consignments to auction as people try to get back on an even keel.

As people scour the attic and the hall cupboard looking for anything that might raise a few pounds, it is a timely reminder of some of the most unexpected things that have come up trumps in the auction rooms.

My favourite story of recent years took place in France last year. An auctioneer was called to clear out the modest 1960s home of a woman in her nineties when she noticed a small wooden painting hanging from the wall above the kitchen stove.

It had been passed down through the family and the old elderly woman thought it worthless, but it struck the auctioneer as something rather better.

Her hunch paid off: is was a lost work by the early Renaissance master Cimabue painted c.1260 – only 11 other works by him are known – and it went on to sell for €24.2 million, making it the world’s most expensive medieval artwork sold at auction.

Occasionally you come across a story that goes to absolute heart of what it means to be a collector. One such is that of the late Arthur Muggeridge, a Royal Artillery veteran who accumulated a fascinating a collection of items linked to spying, counter-espionage and daring POW escapes during the Second World War.

Packed with the sort of items that would have inspired Ian Fleming as he wrote about the ingenious Q, the collection includes concealed weapons, map fragments hidden in dominoes, a string vest that could be unravelled to reveal a single piece of string to be made into an escape rope and even exploding coal.

These all sprang from the imaginations of the boffins of MI9, the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, a department of the War Office between 1939 and 1945 charged with supporting European Resistance networks.

MI9’s Q was Christopher Hutton, who built himself a secret underground bunker in a field so that he could work undisturbed. One of my favourite of his inventions were maps printed on silk (so they wouldn’t rustle) that could be disguised as handkerchiefs. Famously Hutton developed uniforms that could be adapted quickly to look like civilian clothing, and he even supplied a floorplan of Colditz Castle to the officers held there.

Muggeridge’s collection is a real rarity, and although worth close to £20,000, it is the history, brilliance and sheer audacity of those who dreamed all of this up, together with the dramatic wartime stories in which they featured, that make it a dream for any auctioneer.

One of the signatures of the pandemic has been the quiz. Sometimes these have been online, and I have noticed a number of my peers among the auctioneering and dealing fraternity – and it does always seem to be the male variety – posting pictures of objects on Facebook and Twitter, challenging their friends and followers to guess what it is or who made it.

The other type of quiz growing in popularity has been the weekly video conferencing type, with various households from the same family or friendship group coming together over a few drinks and nibbles to compete over rounds of questions on film, geography, current affairs and so forth.

In both cases, while it is pleasant to learn some esoteric facts as the answers are revealed, the real value of these events is that they act as a focus for maintaining communication when all other means of getting together are denied us.

Being the quizmaster on a video conference quiz is a bit like being on the rostrum; somehow one finds oneself surrounded by the same set of characters: the one who doesn’t understand what’s going on at all; another who keeps interrupting at the wrong moment; a third who makes regular challenges to the process…

It can be a bit stressful dealing with all of this, but the fun and camaraderie that goes alongside it means you wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Over the past few years the wealthy appear to have been moving away from buying large country estates and mansions in favour of turnkey luxury properties that are low on maintenance. I assume that they simply don’t want the bother and expense of keeping such large establishments going, and I have noticed many a dream property stalling on the market in search of a buyer. If people don’t want these places, who is going to want the substantial collections of art and antiques that have traditionally filled them? And if they don’t, does that mean prices will fall along with demand? That sort of thing can be a bit of a worry if you’re in a business like mine.

Now, however, the pandemic has clearly led to a rethink and only this week I have been reading about how rich city dwellers are all set to find themselves a comfortable country retreat, with all the amenities that go with it, as a sanctuary against a repeat performance of these unprecedented times. It’s an irony that as the rest of the property market is expecting to see falls of up to twenty per cent in value, the very top end may well enjoy an increase in demand.

It’s a shame that tragedy is the cause of this about face in attitudes, but if it means the preservation and revitalisation of a major part of our cultural tradition, then I, for one, will be focusing on the silver lining rather than the cloud.