It’s astonishing to think that the London Marathon taking place in just over a week’s time will be the 38th instalment of this amazing event. It comes just a few weeks after the death of Sir Roger Bannister, the first recorded person to run a mile in under four minutes.

Chris Brasher, the co-founder of the London Marathon back in 1981, had been one of Bannister’s two pacemakers in the landmark event of 1954, and his business interests later led to the foundation of Sweatshop and its sports clothing lines.

Brasher’s son Hugh is now Race Director for the London Marathon, so the sporting tradition continues in the family.

It’s also another event that has spawned a field of collecting, as a brief visit to eBay will show. Prices are still very affordable but the selection of London Marathon finisher medals now on offer shows that the future is bright for collectors of these sometimes quite garish items. Prices have yet to settle, but the long-term trend, as people lose or discard them, means older medals will become more sought after.

While one 1990 medal is currently on offer for £20, another has an asking price of £70. Top asking price is £80 for a 1995 medal, while the lowest is £3.99 for one from last year. It’s early days, but all of this shows the beginnings of an auction market for these pieces

When it comes local celebrities, I can’t think of anyone who stands in higher regard than the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whose former home, Undershaw, has now been imaginatively redeveloped to house the excellent Stepping Stones school.

Sir Arthur comes to mind once more because of the announcement in the United States that a handwritten manuscript for one of his best-loved short stories is coming to auction this month.

The Adventure of the Dancing Men is the third of 13 tales from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, dating to 1903-04, after Conan Doyle revived his great detective, following popular demand, having previously killed him off in his fight to the death with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.

It’s a memorable story for several reasons, the most notable being the depiction of a cipher, using pictures of stick men, which Holmes has to crack.

The handwritten manuscript contains Conan Doyle’s original corrections as well as the dancing stick men themselves. The author donated the manuscript to charity to be auctioned off in favour of the Red Cross in 1918. The price fetched then is not recorded and, although it clearly sold again, has not appeared at auction for the past 90 years. The estimate now? A cool $500,000.

Oh dear, oh dear! The Australian cricket scandal really is a blow to a sport whose greatest teams have more often than not hailed from Sydney and Melbourne. Ball tampering may not seem the gravest of sins to non-fans, but the scale of the outrage, humiliation and collective shame is indicative of the high passions that can rule what was once the most gentlemanly of sports.

Take all of this into consideration when looking at the collectables market surrounding cricket.

Let’s start at the relatively moderate level with Gary Sobers’ six sixes ball – so controversial there is even a book written about whether what sold was the real thing – which took £26,400 at Christie’s in 2006. Moving up a level, Don Bradman’s 1946-47 Ashes bat sold for almost £42,500 in December 2012, while Sachin Tendulkar’s bat made £58,480 two years earlier.

Bradman (the greatest batsman ever, with Tendulkar) appears again with a price of £175,375 for his 1948 Invincibles tour cap.

Sets of Wisden, the cricketer’s almanac, have reached as high as £90,000, but the biggest prize of all was the collection of cricket scorebooks by Samuel Britcher, the MCC’s first official scorer, whose 1795-1806 records, set down in four books, rose to a staggering £324,000, again at Christie’s, in 2005.

Don’t forget to put your clocks and watches forward an hour this weekend. Despite the wintry scenes outside my window as I write this – and further warnings of snow and ice on the radio – March 25 marks the beginning of British Summer Time. It’s important to me because we will be holding a viewing from 10am for our upcoming Fine Painting Auction on March 28.

Several people take the credit for coming up with the idea of changing the time to suit the seasons, from Benjamin Franklin to George Hudson, an entomologist from New Zealand, who wanted more time after work to look for insects. His efforts were recognised by the award of the YK Sidney Medal in 1933 after New Zealand introduced the Summer-Time Act 1927.

We also have a relatively local figure of significance in this. Farnham-born builder William Willett, having noted how people slept through the first part of summer sunlit mornings, wrote the pamphlet The Waste of Daylight in 1907, proposing the gradual moving forwards of the clocks during the summer, thereby saving £2.5 million in early evening lighting costs. Germany and Austria’s decision to move summer time to save on coal during the First World War prompted the British to follow suit in 1916… too late for Willett, who had died the year before, aged just 58, of influenza.