I'm worried I've found my true passion in life

An audio version is here for paying subscribers.

I was on a long walk with my not-husband Tom and our dog. When I say long, I mean several hours. Our son was with his granny and we were making the most of our childfree time by doing all the nice things that he won’t allow. We’d already covered the sleeping and thinking, so now it was the kind of long walk he refuses to go on despite having the energy levels of a coked-up Duracell bunny.

Somewhere during the third hour, while on a shady woodland path, the conversation turned to people who take on their partner’s hobbies. Stuff like:

“I just don’t know if Sandy/Betty/Jan would be doing bouldering/geocaching/soap carving if her husband wasn’t so into bouldering/geocaching/soap carving.”

Or

“Is trailrunning/taxidermy/burlesque really Danny/Sonny/Patty’s thing, or is it just that their girlfriend likes it?”

We were questioning whether this is their true identity that they’ve finally uncovered or if they are just shaping themselves to fit into their partner’s preferred hole.

I thought about it for a while and then realised that I do this all the time. Although not with my partner, but with my son.

As a child, I’d quite enjoyed completing sticker books. I’d had the Mary Kay one, which was drawings of a girl and her friends. It was popular in the Eighties and feels really weird now, as they wore a cross between seventies and Edwardian clothes. So some would be in bonnets, aprons and flouncy dresses and others in dungarees or flares.

I also collected stickers with stills from the film Annie. It was quite addictive and felt like some stickers were really rare, and you’d have to buy thousands of packets to complete the book.

So I’d had a previous interest in collecting this kind of stuff, but I felt no excitement or nostalgia when my son started wanting to collect Match Attax football cards.

Firstly, I was a bit worried about having to remortgage and release some equity in order to pay for them. (That’s a joke, obviously. There’s no way my mortgage provider would let me remortgage.)

And secondly, I had zero interest in football outside of the big international tournaments and the time it was claimed that Wayne Rooney went with a sex worker called Ye Aulde Slapper at Diva’s massage parlour in Liverpool.

But I started buying him a few packs. And then something really weird happened. I became nearly as obsessed as my son with these football cards.

There are the standard football player cards, but also special versions of these, which might be metallic and shiny, or in a different shape like a shield. They are much more rare and it is such an incredible thrill when one of these appears in a pack.

My son once got what is called a ‘god pack’, where every card is special. There were shields, 100 Clubs, black edges. I don’t know how to explain how rare these are. Basically nobody gets them. And I honestly thought I was going to faint.

And let me just remind you, I don’t even like football.

The Match Attax folders have clear plastic pages and pockets on each side to insert your cards. So they are way better than stickers. Stickers you stick in the book and that’s it. With the cards, you can continually rearrange them. I love it when my son suggests a different way of organising them. Which is strange, as I have no interest or desire to organise the clutter of my own home.

One morning my son asked if I could help him make little stands for his ten favourite cards so they could be on display. “Yes, I can!” I replied at 7am. I painstakingly made little cardboard stands and then found myself saying, “Perhaps I could put a shelf up in your bedroom to put them on.”

I recently gave a load of books away as I couldn’t be bothered to put up a shelf to store them. Reading is my number one hobby. What has happened to me?

The most disturbing point came when my son wanted to watch a video on YouTube, which was an hour of a fully grown man opening one hundred packets of Match Attax cards. I said, “Oh, come on now, you’re not watching this. This is terrible.“

Two minutes later I was gripped. I watched the whole thing. Who am I? All I can say is that, unfortunately, I think I’ve uncovered my true identity, my true passion. And I’m also looking for an extra job so I can remortgage to pay for thousands of football cards.