Fuck Antiques

Fuck Antiques

Fuck ornaments. Fuck old teddy bears. Fuck Lladró, Nao and Nadal. Fucking fuck barometers. Fuck mundane watercolours of the countryside. Fuck glassware and cutlery sets and soup tureens. Fuck anything Chinese. It’s not Ming Dynasty. Fuck brown furniture and fuck the Victorians. Fuck vintage. Fuck retro. Fuck antiques.

An object at least one hundred years old. This is an antique. An insinuation that age inherently adds value. (Hypocritical. If age did inherently add value on all levels of society, our elderly might not be sunk deep in their current and heartbreaking loneliness crisis.)

Here is a Victorian chamber pot.

Not fine, nor rare, but antique. An antique someone literally shat in. Go to your nearest dealership, you can pick one up to decorate your house with.

Fuck antique dealerships. Draughty warehouses in industrial estates filled with unloved, abandoned objects. The moth-eaten sellers a mirror to their wares. And fuck all the St Michael clothes they sell. They’re not antique. They’re just old Marks & Spencer. A sticker on a painting stating that it is an ‘original oil’ does not give it more value. Nor does buying from a sale advertised as ‘from the home of a renowned collector’. Your purchase won’t make you a renowned collector, you are simply paying more money into the pockets of the rich.

Fuck Flog It, Antiques Roadshow and Bargain Hunt. A profit of one pound is not a win it’s a waste of time, raise the stakes! How can we live a life so dull? These shows miscommunicate the auction system and falsely advertise that everyone has an eye. Most people have eyes, yes. An eye is something far different.

On the plus side, they do provide us with a useful glimpse into our post-Brexit dystopian future. A future in which, stuck on our small and trade deal-less island, we are resigned to squabbling amongst each other over a rotating stock of old and tattered objects. Buying and selling and selling and buying the same car-boot trash in the grounds of the old aristocrats. Who somehow are still not dead. If we are lucky we might find a patriotic biscuit tin emblazoned with our dear royals in which we can store yet more of our home cooked Mary Berry shortbread. Unless we have fallen out with Scotland too by then.

And finally, fuck you David Dickinson.