Good questions, Fred. I've never sold anything. Yet! And I don't regret the buying mistakes I've made, because I've learned as much from them as from the good things I've bought. You can't learn without making mistakes, I think.

But I do regret terribly the things I didn't buy when I might have done. For instance: just before I left Hong Kong, after living there and in China for ten years, a friend took me to visit an old lady who was living in a small run-down apartment in a poor area of Kowloon. She had an absolutely amazing collection of Qing dynasty court embroidery that she wanted to sell. Well, I had been buying up a lot of antiques already in India and Southeast Asia and Hong Kong ahead of my upcoming banishment to the wilderness of Canada, and I had very little money left. Just enough for the gold watch and the camera that I urgently needed. And anyway, back in those days Qing was deeply out of fashion. I could have bought a substantial part of the collection for the price of the watch alone, but I went for the watch instead.

Still today, I sometimes recall one particularly magnificent court gown that I can visualize as clearly as if it were here in front of me, and remember what an idiot I was.

Cheers,

Will