It was the end of an era in Oxford when Ducker & Son, the bespoke shoemaker and home of the Oxford brogue, sadly closed down last November. The venerable 6 Turl Street store had traded in the centre of the city since 1898.

Easter Rising 1916 memorabilia may be treasured now by collectors, especially after last year’s centenary, but a medal just sold at auction in Ireland once ended up in a bin rather than proudly displayed.

What is the next collecting area about to take off when it comes to toys? As detailed often in ATG, rare Star Wars figures are now making big money. Lego is another popular market as 40 and 50-somethings settle down, get wealthier and get nostalgic about the toys they played with as kids.

Keep Calm and Carry On is the now famous instruction from the Second World War thanks to a plethora of copycat items inspired by the poster which was never officially issued.

Not many wartime flags survive to be sold at auction due to their inevitably fragile nature, but those flown by Allied forces during the D-Day landings must have been particularly precious as mementos.

The beautiful Japanese woodblock prints created by artists such as Hokusai and Hiroshige inspired similar works across the world and most famously the paintings of Van Gogh.

Unless you have been in a galaxy far, far away for quite some time, you will have heard of Luke Skywalker, Ewoks and Han Solo. But have you heard of a Vlix?

The beautiful Beatrix Potter children’s books are highly collectable in themselves but the author’s world provides a far wider and very popular collecting scene.

With the heroics of ‘the few’ in the Battle of Britain more or less guaranteeing auction interest, it is easy to overlook the incredible bravery of bomber crews.

The plastic fiver has become a familiar sight in the UK since it was issued last September and this summer the tenner version will follow. It seems unlikely that glass coins will also appear – but that was not the case in the US in 1942.

“I am not a number, I am a free man,” was the cry of Patrick McGoohan in TV series The Prisoner. The important number at the Charterhouse auction house on February 12 is £20,000-25,000 - the estimate for a 1963 Lotus Super Seven S2, the model made famous by appearing in that 1960s cult favourite show.

English wines are steadily gaining a reputation for decent quality, with sparkling styles in particular starting to challenge Champagne as an alternative patriotic option. Back in 1889, it was Welsh whisky throwing the gauntlet down to Scotland in the hope of supping long-running success.

Pete Waterman, Neil Young, Roger Daltrey and Peter Snow all do it. Frank Sinatra and Peter Sellers did it. Rod Stewart apparently hires extra hotel rooms on tour to indulge in it. ‘It’ being the innocent and highly popular pastime of model railways.

Most collectors have a burning passion. For John and Patricia McKenzie, the items that fired their interest were vesta cases, the small portable boxes made to contain matches and keep them dry.

Plastic money has been a bone of contention recently thanks to the strange revelation that the new UK £5 notes include animal fat. But one day the polymer notes will surely be as normal and accepted as the existing paper examples, assuming physical money has not all but disappeared anyway by then.

If you want to imagine what a bulletproof vest might look like if designed in the 16th century, a couple of fascinating pieces of very rare armour bought by the Victoria & Albert Museum give a clue.