Stick With It Son

It's been getting very heavy around here lately, all the scandal and the vice.

So here's a little light relief. According to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, nostalgia is "a feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain."

What, no mention of Bagpuss and Spacehoppers?

Anyway, some bloke called Craig Cullen has detonated a bomb in the Hoover Dam of reason and modernity, unleashing a raging torrent of footballing nostalgia, by creating a website which has the entire, completed Panini sticker albums for 1983-84 and 1984-85 seasons, or Football '84 and Football '85 as the understated titles went.

Presumably Craig discovered booze and women sometime during the summer of '86, for the collections which represent the peak of my own sticker career, Football '86 and Football 87, are sadly not included.

While Football '86 was a collection which saw my brother and I finding our feet in the sticker collecting game, by the time Football '87 game round we were at our glorious peak. We swapped doubles and trebles with hard-nosed savvy of Marrakesh bazaar traders; we could sense the presence of precious foil stickers in unopened packs at the newsagent; we could summon the most heart-rending guilt-trips to persuade our parents to stretch to another few packs - food for the baby sisters could wait.

We finished Football '87 by sending off for the final 16 stickers. Neither of us would accomplish anything so profoundly perfect again.

Anyway, check out the '84 and '85 vintages here, including helpful search engines for mullets, taches and perms.