Matt is a 17-year-old schoolboy who in the past couple of months has spent more than ￡600 on tickets to Glastonbury, Reading and assorted other pop festivals. He has financed his summer of noise and sleeplessness by doing something else he enjoys: trading computer games on eBay.

Jane is a mother who quit her full- time job when she had her first baby, and then spent the next six months buying up Bugaboo pushchairs, taking them to pieces and selling the spare parts on eBay at a tidy profit.

Since the website was started nearly 20 years ago, millions of people have been using it to earn extra cash. Millions of others, like me, use it to stuff their houses full of things they don’t need – in my case including 10 pairs of Emma Hope boots, a Victorian armchair with broken springs and a mahogany gavel. For all of us the auction site is variously source of profit, distraction, exhilaration, disappointment, displacement – and education.