I wants my precioussss Lionel Messssssi
What I like about living in a parliamentary democracy of the sort that the hypocritical easy-answers merchants of UKIP say we don't have is that I am able to do whatever I want as long as it isn't illegal.
If I want to change my name to Trevor Pumpernickel, watch TOWIE, or even wear yellow trousers in public, I might have to put up with a degree of ridicule, but the law is on my side.
That's why our fathers and grandfathers went to war against an extreme right-wing gang of foreigner-hating nationalist thugs – so that we wouldn't have to have people like that telling us what to do and who to despise.
But there are limits, and I have to say that something has to be done about adults collecting World Cup football stickers.
In workplaces all around the country, actual men with mortgages and body hair and the ability to vote in elections are asking colleagues, “Got any swapsies?”
Tearful children are walking out of newsagents' shops after being told that unfortunately there are no football stickers left because 10 minutes earlier a man in a suit, with a pocket burning with his £2,000 monthly payslip, has just bought the last 12 packets because he only needs the badge to finish Belgium.
Alternative view: Forget the World Cup itself – feverishly collecting Panini stickers is the real way to spend the summer
People who six weeks ago assumed a Panini album was number one in the classical music charts, or somewhere to file away cheese and ham toasties, are now openly discussing the state of their Ecuador pages.
In my own office I witnessed the rage of a senior executive distraught that the cover of his album had been slightly torn, while behind him the black market trade in sticky photographs of footballers continued.
And I am sitting here confused and a little worried. What will happen next? Will the women in the office start skipping? Will the man sitting behind me play Knock Down Ginger on the editor's door? Will my head be shoved down the toilet?
In the interests of journalistic enquiry I have asked around the office what on earth these people think they are doing. “It's a laugh, isn't it?” has been the general answer, often followed up with the question, “Is it true he's got two Suarezes?”
But it is not a laugh, according to the evidence of my eyes. At its most exciting, it is very dull gambling.
Generally, though what I see is frustration, the frustration of people who only need one obscure footballer to finish a page, and will buy packet after packet until their quest is complete, like Augustus Gloop in search of the golden ticket for Wonka's factory, or until the bailiffs come knocking on the door.
I foresee families torn apart, thanks to the collecting mania of fathers. I foresee men in the gutter, drinking meths, telling anybody who passes by that they only needed one lucky break, “If I'd just had Marouane Fellaini I'd have been fine.” Unlike David Moyes.
But then I have never understood the zeal of the collector. I admit I used to collect comic books - I had more issues than a therapist's waiting room - but that was less a quest and more an accumulation. I liked to read them, I wanted to know what would happen next, and I didn't like to throw them away.
Collecting for the sake of completing a set baffles me, that Gollum-like attitude, the sort of approach to property that adults are supposed to leave behind.
For what happens when the collection is complete? Do you invite friends around to your house and say, “Look! I now have all of the things,” so they might applaud you and say, “Well done, Terry, or whatever your name is, you have got all of the things. You are the best at having all of the things?”
Or do you just experience the soul-sucking emptiness of achieving an ambition and realising there is nothing left for which to strive?
I find it hard to imagine ever voting for UKIP as I do not tend to blame foreigners, women and homosexuals for every problem I have.
But if they promised to introduce age restrictions for football sticker collectors – perhaps using one of those cutout figures they have in theme parks to prevent people of a certain height boarding the Waltzers - I would carry Nigel Farage into Downing Street on my back.
Because these adults buying children's football stickers need to be saved from themselves.
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