As you get older, you start asking yourself some important questions. Questions like: “What the hell have I been doing for the last fifteen years?! And why isn’t there any evidence that I was doing it? Also, what day is it? What year? WHAT YEAR?!” All quite weird questions to be asking, apart from the ‘what year?’. thing.

I always ask myself what year it is. But, anyway, how is it that I seriously have no record of any great achievements from my twenties? All those incredible things I was planning to do when I was 18, where are they? Well, I came up with two equally plausible explanations…

Either, A: Nothing much has happened and I have achieved very little worth remembering as an adult. Or, B: Being the only guy at school to complete the World Cup Italia ’90 sticker album was such a god damn towering achievement, I needed to take a couple of decades off just to get the creative juices pumping again.

And let me tell you something, doing that Italia ’90 sticker album was like some kind of full-time job. Here is a quick list of all the shit I had to do to get that MF done:

1 - Trick an elderly family member into buying me issue one AND the weird A4 ring binder needed to house the incoming tidal wave of World Cup info.

2 - Start collecting the stickers and buying the new edition of the magazine every week for twenty weeks (TWENTY WEEKS).

3 - Get busy and start filing all the latest chapters into their respective tabs (Stickers, Superstars, Golden Goals, Great Games, Finals Fever etc).

4 - Re-up the stash with a couple of extra packs on the way back from school every day.

5 - Hit the playground at lunch and take care of any swapsie action. Most talked about sticker: Hugo Maradona. No idea why.

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6 - Finish the England page and wonder what butthead put Neil Webb and Trevor Steven in the team ahead of Gazza and Waddle.

7 - Send away for all the remaining stickers after the newsagents stopped selling them because I was probably the only guy in the UK still collecting them.

8 - Put in the final sticker (Tomas Skuhravy) and celebrate by cruising around on the BMX with an XXL Slurpee.

9 - Impress all the nine-year-old girls in class with some lazer sharp analysis of Claudio Cannigia.

10 - Keep it on the upstairs bookshelf at Mum and Dad’s house for the next 22 years. Like I said, a god damn full-time job.

You can follow Ben on Twitter- @B___E___N___