All that glisters may not be gold but the stuff that has obsessed everyone from King Midas to the rapper 50 Cent is looking pretty shiny at the moment.

Not so long ago it was written off as an obsolete asset with no place in modern finance. But its value has soared by 250 per cent in the past decade and it’s now about to burst through the historic $1,000-an-ounce barrier.

Which makes it rather a shame that Gordon Brown sold off more than half of Britain’s gold reserves at the bottom of the market.

The search for gold is as old as civilisation. One of its special properties – aside from the fact that it is incredibly scarce and virtually indestructible – is that it can turn up in pure nuggets without being mined. That tends not to happen nowadays – I wouldn’t get your hopes up – but at the dawn of history the stuff was first discovered in shining yellow lumps in streams all over the world and was one of the first metals known to mankind.

Easy to work and dispersed widely through the world, it was discovered by many different groups and nearly all who found it were impressed. In 4000BC it was being mined from the slopes of Mount Pangaion in northern Greece to make decorative objects.
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