And while I'm being all retrospective...

25 years of the national lottery? Wow. I bought seven tickets for the first draw, I'm embarrassed to admit. I was an 18-year-old student with no money. One of them won £10, so with hindsight I really should have quit while I was ahead, invested the £3 profit and been a millionaire by now.

Sonic Twosday

I bought Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the Sega Mega Drive at 1:27pm on Saturday February 6th, 1993, at Dixons in Boston, Lincolnshire. The assistant's name was David. See, I told you I've got a good memory!

Actually, my memory is obviously a lot worse than people say it is, because I just found tonight that the till receipt is still in the box, tucked inside the free poster! And I really don't remember it being there, although logically I must have noticed it now and then in all the time I've spent playing that game cartridge in the last nearly 27 years!

It all makes me try to reconstruct what my 16-year-old self was doing buying it in February. I guess it must have been a case of saving up my leftover Christmas money and pocket money until I could afford the discounted bargain price of £35 (Mega Drive games normally cost £40) that Dixons were selling the world's coolest game for. I'm glad to say the month-and-a-half of waiting was well worth it, because I've had a whole lot of fun with that game over the years!

(And since I was in Boston, we would have been at our mother's house that weekend, so I would have had to wait till we went home on Sunday to actually plug it into the Mega Drive - I tell you, the waiting must have been well nigh unendurable!)

I'd only got a Mega Drive for Christmas in 1992, so when Sonic 2 first came out in November that year, we'd had to be content with the (luckily, equally wonderful) Master System version. I've still got that, too, naturally, but I didn't keep the receipt for that one, or indeed anything else I've ever bought, as far as I can recall.

I'm not sure whether I put the receipt in the box in an uncharacteristic moment of caution in case the game didn't work when I eventually got it home, or if David put it in there when he sold it to me. Probably David.

Triangular football

Quite literally eight times out of ten, the last match days of the European championship qualifying tournament are a waste of everyone's time, since it's already been settled who will qualify. But then you occasionally get a wonderfully cool arrangement like Wales vs Hungary, where the winner qualifies, but if it's a draw, it's Slovakia! I really hope there's an army of travelling Slovakian fans attending that game in Cardiff tonight (instead of, say, their own game, in Slovakia), enthusiastically cheering for a stalemate and urging both teams not to score any goals. I'd go along and do it myself, but it's cold outside.