Sometimes collecting and auction values can take a strange turn. While I can understand the potential value of hair and nail clippings from the likes of Elvis Presley and Neil Armstrong – modern day equivalents of holy relics – neither is the sort of thing I would want to buy; but each to their own.

Now we have the extraordinary market in trainers. That’s right, limited edition footwear that has become a billion-dollar-plus collecting market over the past few years. It still follows the same rules as other collectable markets, with values being determined by creator, rarity and association, as well as condition. Strangely, it has close parallels to the limited issue collectable whisky market, with ranges being deliberately engineered to create demand via highly publicised timed releases. Perhaps more importantly, the trainer market is largely populated by young people who have become almost instantly adept at trading in their purchases via specialist apps and platforms.

This is good news because it shows the timeless appeal of collecting and dealing; only the commodities and collectables themselves change, while technology simply adds to the variety of ways in which they can be traded, including online auctions.

Anyone who thinks the antiques market is out fashion is wrong; it’s just that it moves with the times. Hurrah for that.

As The Ashes get underway, all the pundits have been dedicating acres of space to the minutiae of everything from tactics and teams to sledging and spirit. One of my favourite articles is the inevitable All-Time England Ashes XI – the first of these I read this year named Sir Leonard Hutton as captain and included players from as long ago as 1901 (Sydney Barnes) and as recently as 2009 (Andrew Flintoff).

Passions run high and deep when it comes to cricket, so it is no surprise that passions run equally high and deep when a really rare and desirable piece of cricketing memorabilia comes up for sale.

Perfectly timed for this year’s Ashes series is the newly announced sale of a bat once owned by arguably the greatest cricketer ever to emerge from Australia – and possible the greatest cricketer of all of the 20th century: Sir Donald Bradman.

It’s not just any old bat either; alongside Bradman’s signature are the signatures of 16 England players, including that of Douglas Jardine, captain of the notorious Bodyline Ashes series of 1932-33, which is still talked about today.

Picked up for a few hundred dollars by a now unemployed man from New Zealand, the bat is expected to sell for up to $35,000. That still seems cheap to me.

As Edinburgh prepares for the world’s biggest culture festival, its bars, pubs, cafes and restaurants will doubtless be stocking up to feed and water the estimated 400,000 visitors who will descend on them before and after they have satisfied their hunger for music, theatre and comedy. Doubtless, too, one of the most popular drinks to be downed will be whisky, a drink that gets its name from the gaelic usquebaugh, or ‘water of life’.

As the market for whisky shows today, this is no old man’s drink. Imbibers and collectors are often in their twenties and thirties, and the auction and investment markets for whisky see active buyers from these age groups too – more so than the wine industry.

In fact, for all the fuss made over gin in recent years, whisky has stolen a march on it as a collecting and investment marketplace.

Many other nations have been getting in on the act and making their own to a very high standard, from England Wales to, most notably, Japan and Australia.

Really, whisky operates two markets: one in age-old rare bottles and casks left over from defunct distilleries or held back as one-off specials from decades ago; and another comprising short-run bottlings or casks, often to celebrate anniversaries or special occasions.

With Bourbon, rye whiskey and other creations adding to the mix, this is an exciting market to become involved in.

The Moon Landings and first Moon Walk are among the most important events in recent human history – less for scientific reasons than for metaphorical ones, I’d say. So the 50th anniversary of the Neil Armstrong’s ‘Giant Leap’ was bound to create more than a flurry of interest when it came to auctions, and so it proved.

Simple pieces of equipment, along with photographs, have acquired huge iconic status, culminating in the $1.82 million taken for original tapes of that first famous Moon Walk.

Sold for a little over $200 in a government surplus auction in 1976 (can you believe that?!) to a prescient NASA intern, the tapes are apparently much sharper than the hazy moon shots transmitted across the planet on July 20, 1969 via what was then fairly new and basic satellite technology.

Looking at news reports in the past couple of weeks, it is clear that some of the images captured by the astronauts on the various Saturn and Apollo missions are now seen more as art than scientific record, none more so than Earthrise, the first view of the Earth as it rose above the lunar horizon, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968 and hailed as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken” by nature photographer Galen Rowell.

The 50th anniversary may be over, but this now mature collecting field is here to stay.