Antiques

Antiques collecting has never been more popular in the UK. Many people enjoy going to specialist antiques fairs to buy, sell or just look at whatever bizarre items are on sale. The antiques trade is about much more than just old fashioned furniture, with people collecting anything from clothing, toys, musical instruments and jewellry to baseball trading cards, signed celebrity photographs and sporting memorabilia. Although not to everybody's tastes, here are some of my favourite oddities! What about yours? Please post below!

Does anybody have the time, please? If you lived in the middle ages you would need one of these babies to give a correct answer to what now seems such a banal question. It's called an astrolabe and an original version is substantially more valuable than any iphone!

This little thing isn't worth as much as the astrolabe, but it can be just as useful if you have got an itchy back!

All that effort cracking nuts is infinitely more interesting with a bronze crocodile!

One for the comic book geeks! This is the first appearance of Batman and is widely considered to be the most valuable comic in the world. If you had a copy in mint (perfect) condition, you could expect to get anywhere around $25,000 for it! Go check the atttic!

A great video which tells you all about the intricate workings of an astrolabe.

Vocab:

bizarre - strange

trade - business

tastes - interests

oddities - unusual objects

banal - boring

itchy - irritable

to crack - to break open

geeks - people with unusual interests

widely - generally