Piers Motley-Nash, in his latest column, writes about Billy the Auction Dog - an addition to the team at Piers Motley Auctions

Exhausted! We’ve just completed Two 2 Day Sales with a total of 2600 lots in 6 weeks making a massive £260,000 of sales.

People often say to me “I don’t know how you stay on the rostrum all day selling.”

To be honest it can be a bit tiring talking non-stop for 8 hours or more. However, the work that goes into setting up a sale and the work shipping and organising collections and immediately setting up another auction is far more taxing.

In addition to this Lee, our second auctioneer, has recently had his second child. This meant just a few extra hours while he was on paternity to set up our September sale. Since then Lee has had ‘new baby sleep deprivation’, combined with setting up sales that are twice as big as usual and needing so much more preparation selling under new COVID restrictions

The Auction Team now resembles The Walking Dead.

It’s been a difficult time for a lot of us, but as Lee says being this busy is a “good problem to have”. What we have missed the most is not having many regulars in for viewing and saleday. It’s the human interaction which makes this job worthwhile. Some have struggled to take advantage of online bidding and many are feeling frustrated by a whole range of things.

What keeps us all going is a sense of humour and Billy our auction dog. We often try to get him into one of the pictures uploaded onto our catalogue and with two cowboy hats in the November sale we took the opportunity...