Geek? Moi?

Internet, meet R2D2. He’s 35 years old, which in fact makes him one year older than my husband, who found him in the attic.

I used to have this very model of R2D2, many years ago. Sadly, the original R2 was lost when a friend’s neighbour’s Jack Russell chewed him beyond repair. I’d complained about his sad demise so often that when Paul uncovered this little fellow stashed away in a box, he decided to give him to me.

Altogether now: Awwwwwww!

(Seriously. You know it’s true love when a man in his thirties gives you a gift of one of his own original Star Wars figures.)

So here he is, on my desk, guarding my TARDIS. Which is a USB hub. It makes the sound of the TARDIS when you plug in a USB drive. (Yes, you can turn the sound off.) Admittedly I stole that from Paul when I got tired of having to grovel about behind the computer to plug things in, I didn’t go looking specifically for the geekiest USB hub I could possibly find. (And I’m fairly certain somebody out there can tell me that this isn’t it!)

But while I don’t tend to display my geekiness as much as some of my friends, I’ll admit it here and now:

I’m a Star Wars fan.
(Episodes IV to VI, obviously, plus the surprisingly good Clone Wars cartoons.)

And a Doctor Who fan.
(Tom Baker, plus everything that Steven Moffat wrote for Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant. Oh, and The Doctor’s Wife, of course.)

I’m a Pratchett fan, and a Gaiman fan, and a Sherlock fan, and a Prisoner fan, and a Lost Boys, Labyrinth, Bladerunner fan.

When I was little, I used to go round to a schoolfriend’s house. Not to play with her, but to hang out with her younger brother who had an AT-AT. Awesome. When I was at art college, my boyfriend at the time also had an enormous collection of Star Wars stuff, including a cardboard Death Star set. We used to spend hours lying on the floor in the dining room, making the trash compactor work, or making stormtroopers walk into doors. As you do. When you’re nineteen. It turns out that when you’re late getting home because you lost track of the time, it’s incredibly difficult to get your parents to believe that’s what you were doing! He also took me to see Bladerunner when the Director’s Cut came out. We came home from the cinema and immediately watched the original version on video, which confused the living daylights out of me.

Labyrinth is definitely my comfort film, and no, not just because of David Bowie’s remarkable trousers. It’s because of the details. Most notably the bottles of milk that I spotted when my Dad took my sister and I to see the film at the cinema, and which Paul insists that I’ve imagined! (You see them when Sarah enters Jareth’s castle. They’re to the left of the door, although they’re probably cut off unless you’re watching the widescreen version.)

Good Omens and Wyrd Sisters are my comfort books, the ones I’ll always take with me if I’m going on holiday or into hospital, and the only two that I’ve read so many times that I’ve had to buy new copies because the original paperbacks dropped to bits. Oh, I tell a lie. I read my Dad’s copy of Hitchhikers until that fell apart. Sorry Dad…

I don’t buy (much) merchandise, or write fan fiction, or make clever gifs for tumblr, or spend time analysing plots and possibilities. So perhaps I’m not a geek at all, and my liking of these things is simply to do with my age, in that these films, books and television shows were the primary cultural phenomena when I was growing up. Although I know that my sister’s never seen Star Wars, hasn’t read Pratchett, and almost certainly doesn’t have an R2D2 and a TARDIS on her desk.

So yes. Perhaps it’s time to admit that I am just a little bit of a geek after all. Although I’m guessing that doesn’t really come as a surprise!