on Tuesday Life lessons from stickers have stuck on me
CONKERS. Marbles. Tazos. Pogs. Garbage Pail Kids. Those cards which were given out in the back of cigarette packets. When I was growing up, there was always something to collect, that would generally be swapped in the playground or with your friends.
But while all of the above are memorable – and there are no doubt many more I’ve not listed – the chief of all collectibles was stickers. And football stickers in particular.
My first album was Italia 90, which had stickers of every player in the 1990 World Cup. There was also a coin collection for those who filled up with petrol at Esso garages, as I remember, but it was the Panini sticker collection which was really what mattered.
That summer, the playground was abuzz with the excitement of collection, and you could tell the kids who were spoiled as they had a stack of swaps two inches thick.
You would hear ‘got, got, got, NEED!’ ringing across the concrete at break-time, as keen collectors tried to track down the player they sought in rectangular paper form.
The goal was always to get within 50 stickers of finishing the album. That was the point at which you could send off for the last, rare stickers that you needed.
I don’t know if stickers are such a big thing these days; I have two girls who aren’t really interested in football, or stickers, for that matter.
Plus there is the cost. I thought I would start collecting stickers for this year’s Euros for fun, and to see if my girls could be lured into it.
I was shocked to find that they are now 90p for a packet of five stickers.
That is a hefty rise on the 20p you paid for six stickers in 1990. I realise 31 years have passed since then, but a loaf of bread was 50p then – that is according to statistics which are used to calculate inflation based on the price of basic goods.
A 450% rise in bread would mean we should now be paying £2.50 for a loaf – and getting fewer slices of bread into the bargain.
There is also the sheer number of stickers needed to complete an album this year: A whopping 678.
Thanks to the internet (which I really think will catch on), I can tell you that there were 448 stickers needed to complete Italia 90, and 560 to complete France 98.
So the current collection must weigh heavily on pocket money.
A quick bit of maths shows that a single sticker this year costs 18p – almost as much as an entire packet in 1990.
Completing this year’s album would cost you more than £120. Plus, any sticker collection will inevitably end up with a lot more swaps left over at the end.
All in all, it leads me to think that there are a whole lot of youngsters who might never get to collect them in the first place.
That would be a travesty. Stickers come from a world when there was no internet, no mobile phones and a time when happiness was a picture of Paolo Maldini or Thierry Henry in sticky-backed paper form.
There are so many valuable skills to be learned, too. For starters, there was the bargaining. If you had a rare sticker, you could ask for two swaps, or even more.
It taught you how to deal with disappointment – the day when you got a packet of stickers which was all common swaps which everyone already had.
It was a lesson in memory – you had to memorise a collection of hundreds of stickers to know the ones you still needed.
And there was the sheer patience needed to finish a whole album when all you could afford was a packet or two.
That’s a lot of life lessons from a few stickers, so I, for one, hope that they continue to stick around for a lot longer.
I thought I would start collecting stickers for this year’s Euros and was shocked at the price