All that's gold doesn't necessarily glitter

Australia's first "gold party" was held last week at Bondi Icebergs. The idea of the event, hosted by an outfit called Gold Converters, was that guests took along all the unwanted bits and bobs in their jewellery boxes and swapped them on the spot for a cheque. Apparently this pesky global financial crisis plus sky-high gold prices have led to an increasing number of people wanting to cash in their unworn trinkets for something more useful, with rings from broken engagements high on the list of items being handed over.

I don't have a problem with this concept. If a piece of jewellery is unworn and unloved, is there any more reason to hang on to it than say, a jacket you no longer wear? Once I get fed up with a piece of clothing, for whatever reason, I don't hesitate to send it off to St Vincent de Paul to live again in someone else's wardrobe. Why not do the same with jewellery?

I actually don't have an unloved engagement ring hanging around (the only person who's ever offered to buy me one was a spectacularly grubby and aromatic homeless guy outside Town Hall station) nor do I have any old bits of gold jewellery lurking in the bottom of my jewellery box anymore. Someone else's personal financial crisis took care of that a couple of years ago when he or she broke into my apartment and stole a mixed bag - literally, since my overnight bag was one of the items missing - of goodies, including anything that looked vaguely valuable from my jewellery box. The rest of it was upended on the floor, along with the contents of every drawer in my bedroom. Lovely.

To be honest there wasn't anything particularly valuable amongst the jewellery stolen, or at least not in a monetary sense. I would be surprised if the thief received more than a couple of hundred bucks at a pawn shop but some of the pieces had a huge amount of sentimental value for me - a bracelet my parents had bought me for my 13th birthday and a cross that used to belong to my great aunt, for example.

Fortunately I had household insurance so after about a zillion hours schlepping around jewellery shops getting valuations for similar, replacement items, I received not a cheque but a credit note at a jeweller in the city. Chances are I wouldn't have bought jewellery at all if I'd had my choice (a return ticket to Paris sounded like a much better idea at the time) but since I had to, I decided to buy two special pieces, rather than replacing everything I'd actually lost.

I'd like to say that there's some moral to this story but other than the fact that jewellery is a very personal thing, I'm not sure there is really. I have however, worn the trinkets I bought with my credit note pretty much every day since then and I wouldn't swap them for all the cash in Bondi.