We mostly look for paintings, but we're interested as well in clocks, oriental porcelains, bronzes, all manner of decorative items that attract our attention because of their unique nature, their (mostly assumed) provenance, their beauty, all of which satisfy our sense of aesthetic and enhance our lives through providing a focus of interest around us.

We can certain live without all of these things, but they do make our lives even more pleasant than they already are. If it became a toss-up between books and bits and pieces of antique objects, I guess books would win the contest hand down; they, it would be difficult to live without. The ongoing and fairly casual search for beautiful objects, however, does grasp our interest. And yesterday after breakfast we hied ourselves over to the centre of town to do just that -- look about to see if there were any offerings that might fulfill our search to acquire yet another piece of the past.

It was the occasion of the semi-annual antique show that comes to this city in the spring and fall. They are now put on at the Fieldhouse of Carleton University. The show itself has gradually deteriorated from one where responsible antique dealers coming from Toronto and Montreal and all points between would bring what they had painstakingly collected through estate sales and auctions and serendipity, to present at these shows -- to one that largely now features jewellery, memorabilia and junk with the occasional real thing thrown in for contrast.

At the fall show we bought nothing, because nothing appealed as genuinely worthwhile. At this spring sale, there were even fewer dealers, though there were ample potential customers. The genuine antique dealers have discovered that Ottawa is not a useful venue for them. Although the purchasing power is there, the interest in arts and antiques seems tepid at best. So they now no longer bother going to the trouble of packing their desirable objects to haul them out to this city, then do the very same in reverse, hauling back most of what they had to offer.

For us personally it's a bit of a let-down, but in fact we hardly have need to augment what we have collected over the past 50 years of shared interests. As it happened we did come across a walnut-case bracket clock with a beautifully intact brass face. Just as we prepared to approach the vendor, another browser had him turn the clock around to view its interior works, find the pendulum and set it in place, but something appeared to go awry, the suspension had been fixed at some time in the past, and there was a tiny bit missing so the clock wasn't able to operate, and this turned the buyer away.

Which provided the opportunity for my husband to step forward, explain to the vendor that he knew what was wrong, and it made no difference to him, whereupon the vendor offered a very good reduction to the selling price, and the clock became ours. Later that evening, my husband finished working on the clock, restoring it to perfect operation, and it has now joined our clock collection.