ANYONE can make cash from trash. It pays to delve among rubbish, believe me.

I have spent fruitless hours trawling through stuff that people take to recycling centres across Hampshire.

I've done it on and off for years - occasionally snaffling a wooden bookcase for a fiver or some obscure hand tool for the garden.

Fascinating There is something fascinating about rooting through the stuff, never knowing just what you might find.

My wife thinks it marks me as only a couple of chromosomes short of lunacy. My daughter yawns and stays in the car. My family and friends - well, I don't tell them.

That may change. A few months back I was shuffling through the assorted household items dumped at the Alres-ford recycling centre.

It has a corrugated steel shed filled with old golf clubs, Val Doonican and Jim Reeves records, and discarded dark brown furniture that would have been fashionable in the 1950s - the assorted detritus of numerous lives that washes up unwanted here in an industrial estate on the edge of Alresford.

In the days before recycling, this is the stuff that might have been taken to a charity shop but more likely would have been thrown in the dustbin.

I flicked through the pictures that once brightened up many a home and now slowly mildew. A poster for a Spanish holiday resort from the 1970s, a print of fox-hunting, a garish oil painting of flowers in a vase, a weird-looking Chinese print... hello, that was unusual. Flicking back, I pulled out the odd-looking Chinese print.

Immediately it looked different. A quick check in the bottom right-hand corner showed it was a limited edition, one of only 60 done by someone called Toko Shinoda.

I can't say I liked it, but it was obvious that it shouldn't be going to waste at the centre. How on earth did it end up among the junk?

The member of staff looked at it, shrugged and charged me £2. Once at home I started Googling. Toko Shinoda, it emerges, is a Japanese artist, born in 1913 and described as one of Japan's foremost calligraphers, a master of the art that can trace its lines back 3,000 years to ancient China.

Some of her work sells for thousands of dollars. Work the same size and style as mine. I e-mailed a dealer in Tacoma, Washington. He estimated a value of $2,000 to $3,000. Flashing into mind were visions of a summer holiday in Barbados, freedom from the shackles of credit card debt, perhaps a new car.

But there would be the problem of getting it the USA and selling it in a foreign country and all that bureaucratic hassle.

Closer to home, dealers in London were less enthusiastic. Some specialists didn't bother to return letters. Sothebys reckoned it was worth less than £1,000 and so not valuable enough for them.

Salisbury-based Woolley and Wallis have a fine art section and were happy to sell it. Their valuation was £300 to £500 with a reserve price of £270.

In these Internet days and instantaneous global communication, having it sold in Wiltshire might not be an obstacle for a good price.

I decided a bird in the hand in Salisbury was better than two in the bush in the USA.

It sold at auction for £300. There was no transatlantic telephone bidding pushing the price into the stratosphere.

Not enough for a holiday or a car, but a decent return on something that cost £2 and was difficult to like. Of course, I reserve the right to be cheesed off if it turns out to have been the long-lost Shinoda that once belonged to Emperor Hirohito etc and was valued at £15,000...

But whenever I'm dumping bottles I'm still looking, and recently found a box of 1980s indie vinyl.

Anyone want Bauhaus's proto-Goth 12in classic Bela Lugosi's Dead?