I BOUGHT Manchester United goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar for £7, and then swooped for Hull’s Kevin Kilbane for £1.69. But my £6 bid for Liverpool’s Fernando Torres was unsuccessful at the time of going to press.

You must think I’m going barmy and I am totally deluded.

Well I’m not really mad – because I am talking about ‘Match Attax’ football trading cards, a craze which has taken the nation’s children by storm.

My son and his mates are utterly obsessed by these cards, and we have shelled out a fortune in helping him build up his collection.

Each packet of six players costs 50p, but then there are the tins and the bags and all the other paraphernalia that comes with the hobby.

In my day, we collected football stickers. But it was all fairly straightforward if I recall rightly. You finished when you had collected every player from every team.

But in today’s world, you have to have all the managers, plus the extra players in the transfer window. And there are additional ‘Man of the match’ cards as well as a select group of ‘100 Club’ ones.

My lad has finished all the teams, but several of these speciality cards elude him.

So he asked on Saturday if I would buy the remaining ones, especially Torres, on the internet. That sounded fair enough because I figured it would save me the expense of having to shell out on any further 50p packets.

But what I didn’t figure was that Torres was available online for around £12 on various sites. Yes, £12 for a little card.

Then I stumbled on to eBay, the auction site which I had never previously used. Bids were being made for Torres here, and it seemed we could get him for £4.

Now that’s still a ridiculous amount for a card, but somehow the whole thing had become distorted in my brain and I joined in the bidding. And somehow this auction price escalated to more than £6. £7 if you count the postage. For a while I was top bidder, and I was mightily glad to be pipped at the last moment.

I vowed that would be an end of that.

But my disappointed son asked me if I could look into getting van der Sar, so I logged on, only to find there was just 18 seconds remaining in the auction process. In panic, I slammed in a 50p bid higher than anyone else’s – and moments later was congratulated by eBay for winning.

I gulped because I had just paid £7 for this card without realising and it wasn’t even the main one we really wanted.

But my son went to bed on Sunday night asking if I could at least get him Kilbane ‘Man of the match’ – one of the last cards he needed – if the price was right because he was on offer for just 99p plus 50p postage. He even supplied me with an alarm clock to signal the end of the auction in less than two hours’ time.

Now this auction had been going several days and we were the only bidders at 99p, so I was sure it was job done, particularly when I checked with seven minutes remaining. No one else had bothered – and why indeed would they?

I went downstairs and carried on watching TV, losing track of the time. Eventually, I realised I’d forgotten to log on at the end of the auction, and I returned to my PC expecting to have won. Imagine my horror when I realised an unknown bidder had stepped in and snapped up Kilbane for £1.04p.

I was stunned. Someone somewhere had actually waited all day long until the last possible moment to add five pence to an auction to buy a trading card for an obscure Hull City player.

Mrs Editor’s Chair was livid I’d been gazumped so naively, and she promptly found another Kilbane auction about to expire.

I was made to wait by the PC until there were just 45 seconds left. Then I zapped in a 99p bid for the card – and won it.

Yes, I had come of age in the ruthless world of internet auctions and I eagerly await the arrival of this card any day now in the post. A card I neither want or need and which will no doubt be consigned to a dusty drawer along with all the others when it’s time for next year’s craze.

The psychology of auctions is a fascinating subject – in particular how customers such as me are induced to buy stuff they don’t really want at prices they can’t afford to pay.

However, until the internet came along, most people didn’t participate in auctions. I have little doubt they are of benefit to a great many people, but obsessive idiots such as me can be panicked into spending too much.

So in a couple of years’ time, you may see me wandering the streets of Bucks after having lost my house, my car and the shirt off my back. And, no, it won’t be alcoholism or gambling on the horses that’s brought me to this low. I’ll probably have just frittered away my last pennies trying to snap up a Wayne Rooney trading card.