OWNED: The Good, the Bad and the eBay...

As we all know, eBay can be a treacherous place to buy if you don't know your onions, or indeed if you find an onion you haven't seen before and there aren't any other onions of a similar type to compare... and so it was that I paid a slightly over the top price for this Grand Carrera catalogue.

I'd never seen it before and there weren't any others available to compare prices, and after I made an initial offer of £20 (the asking price was £30) we settled on a compromise of £26. Well all I can say is they must have been laughing all the way to the bank. In the weeks since I bought this two more have appeared, one is not selling at £24 and one is not selling at £3.99.... seriously, I paid £26 for something I could have bought for £3.99. Not happy!

Still it's a nice catalogue, albeit it doesn't have any of the coated models in it, just the original wave. It's also quite a big book, about a foot across and considerably larger than I was expecting (knowing the size of most of the landscape TAG catalogues I own).

A couple of days later I came across what looked like the same catalogue but in portrait form going for £10. I messaged the seller asking them what was inside, I was intrigued because not only did I not understand why TAG would print the same catalogue in landscape and portrait but also this one came with a dustcover.

I got no response from the seller and decided to go for it, and was rather surprised when it arrived to find that it wasn't the same catalogue at all but a proper sized coffee table book containing photos and bios for a huge number of TAG Heuer ambassadors.

To be completely honest, I could have done with a few more watch pics in there... but it's still a cool thing to own and a bargain at £10.

My next purchase was a watch stand, I've seen many of these on eBay, but they always seem to be the type with the very small base - designed to fit into a retaining hole in the main display I should imagine - and I always thought they would most likely fall over at the drop of a hat, especially with a heavy-ish' watch balanced precariously on top. So when I saw this one with a very substantial base and another stand thrown in, I couldn't resist. I paid about £30 for this set, which was a close call as I bid right at the very last second and won. I won't use it everyday, but it will come in handy for photographing my watches and I plan to update all the photos of my watches using this very soon.

Finally I picked up this small form, 16 page booklet on the new Lady Link series. It wasn't something I was desperate to buy but for £1.50 I couldn't turn it down. It just goes to show not everything collectible has to cost a fortune.