Town mouse visits Masterpiece 2015

I left Masterpiece with my head spinning. Every sort of desirable artwork or bibelot was on offer: Thracian coins, Sèvres vases, illuminated manuscripts, Aboriginal paintings, anatomical models, mahogany furniture, diamonds to delight even Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee. It may be that the auction price of contemporary works continues to defy gravity, but plenty of money seems left for other styles of collecting.

What, I wondered somewhat academically, could I live with most comfortably at home? There was a lovely fragment of an Egyptian head that would have sat happily on my desk, making me forever wonder what the whole figure would have been like.

So many marvels and one more as I made for the exit. There was the Savills stand, where they gave me a pair of goggles to try Horoma neither a dance nor a foodstuff, but a ‘bleeding edge, real property visualisation solution’.

In the manner of a video game, it enables you to walk through a building (in this case, a country house called Furze Croft) without actually being there: you go wherever you look, up into the air for a view of the roof if you want to. Only don’t look down: they’ve left out the floor, so you feel as if you’re standing at the edge of a cliff. I did say that my head spun.

Spectator: Have rod, will travel

Lucy Baring doesn’t have fish fever.

Country mouse spots a hedgehog

Sightings to savour.