So if the theme music for the last post was "Sir Richard's Song" and "Farewell, My Friend, I'm Bound for Canaan", then the music for today is "Packing Up Is Hard To Do".

This morning's excursion took me to the reputable auction house of B&B to have appraised all of my "artwork" over 100 years old. A moderately intimidating experience, so when the expression of the rather terse "specialist" (who was half an hour late for our appointment, despite both pre-arrangement and being paged repeatedly by the front desk) turned sour I stuffed the dregs of my collection back into the portfolio and declared us done. Since the appraisal paperwork is needed to get old stuff into the UK, this experience helped to identify pieces to be purged from the collection prior to departure. Alas but this evening I realized that I had not brought along three peices that I do not wish to part with even more than I do not wish to repeat the whole appraisal experience. Sigh.