Retired Decorator Finally Paints the Town After Attic Pokémon Cards Sell for £1.56 Million, Leaving Every Parent Who Threw Out a Binder in 2003 Staring at the Ceiling

Every attic in Britain is now under investigation by the family that owns it. A retired decorator from Woking has become a millionaire after the Pokémon cards he left up there for 15 years sold for £1.56 million at Ewbank's in Surrey, and the nation's loft ladders have not had a quiet night since.

The man does not want to be identified, which is the first sensible thing anyone has done in the collectibles market since 1999. He spent a career putting fresh coats on other people's walls. He retired, climbed into his own roof, and found the walls had been paying him the whole time.

The origin story is pure suburban prophecy. In the late 1990s his son started swapping cards at school. The father, by his own account, "thought they looked nice and wondered whether they might be a good investment." Most of us thought the same thing about a timeshare. He was the one who was right.

He did not gamble on booster packs like a common child. He bought complete sets from a seller in Malaysia on eBay, reasoning that "it would be cheaper to buy the full set rather than keep buying sealed packs of random cards in hope that when you opened them you could complete a set." This is the single most British sentence ever spoken about a fire-breathing dragon. He approached Pokémon the way other men approach a fence panel: measure once, buy the whole kit, never open it.

Then his son lost interest. Into the attic went the binders, sealed and mint. Children grow up. Cardboard, it turns out, appreciates.

The decorator had no idea any of it was worth anything until he read in his local paper that a single card had fetched more than £6,000. Local journalism is dying, they tell us. It just made a man a millionaire with one article about a teacher's wedding fund.

He took a sample to Ewbank's. "When we saw what he had – all in mint condition – we couldn't believe it, or the fact that he had no idea what they were worth," said James Spooner, the head of trading cards. Then came the second act. "When we then discovered that he had 42 such sets, our jaws hit the floor. We got to sell 41 of them, and he kept one." Forty-one for the bidders, one for the soul. That is not a collection. That is a pension with a mascot.

The auction house thought the lot might reach £270,000. The day before the sale it already held £825,000 in commission bids. On the day, YouTubers, collectors and investors piled in, which is how you know the economy has entered its cartoon phase. The Legendary Collection Complete Master Set, with its near-mint Charizard, was pitched at £15,000 to £20,000 and hammered at £100,000. One set that cost him about £300 went for £75,000. No index fund has ever breathed fire.

Ewbank's called it the most valuable trading card auction ever held in the UK. Somewhere a man who sold his binder at a car boot sale for a fiver has quietly begun a new hobby, which is lying awake.

The lesson for parents is simple and cruel. That cardboard you nagged a child to throw away was not clutter. It was a retirement plan waiting for the child to get bored.

He kept one set. Of course he did. A decorator always leaves a spare tin in the loft, just in case.