Ah, The Hobbit. Now we’re Tolkien.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, of course, not being the sort of person who gets invited to stand on red carpets at film premieres while paparazzi shout “look left!” and “look right!”. But like a lot of socially awkward young boys my early life seems to have been inextricably linked with the history of Middle Earth.

Why, one of the earliest insults I can remember receiving was when I was a young boy sitting on the sofa with no socks on, and my mother delightedly pointing out that I had “Hobbit’s feet”.

For those who’ve, well, been living in a Hobbit hole recently, Hobbits are the peacable, fun-loving denizens of Tolkien’s The Shire, short in stature and with big hairy feet. Can’t quite see the resemblance myself, but there you go.

The Hobbit is, essentially, a children’s book. But it’s also a gateway drug to Tolkien’s much more ambitious work, The Lord Of The Rings. I still have the three volumes of Lord Of The Rings I read as a child, somewhat stunned at the shift in language and scope from the much more accessible Hobbit.

The only time I’ve felt such a gear-change was when I did A Level physics after passing the subject at O Level. At the lower level it was all “look! Here’s some water boiling!” and then the following year it was “Barnett, what do you mean you don’t understand the Planck Constant?”

Unlike A Level physics, which I jacked in when it became apparent that, actually, it WAS rocket science and I had no hope, ever, of getting my noggin around it, I persevered with Lord Of The Rings, and was transformed from a shy, socially-awkward pubescent into a shy, socially-awkward pubescent with a sudden encyclopedic knowledge of Orcs, Trolls, Uruk-Hai and Dwarves. Oh, and I could write my name in Elvish, which impressed the girls at the school disco no end.

In fact, now I think about it properly, I can probably thank JRR Tolkien for directly hampering my ability to get a girlfriend in my teenage years, being both a nerd and having a lofty if skewed ideal of womanhood, which meant I didn’t really want to settle for anyone less than Galadriel the Elf Queen of Lothlorien.

So mired was I in Middle Earth that while the rest of my peers were out sniffing glue or getting pregnant, and sometimes both, on occasion simultaneously, I decided to read the Silmarillion, an entire history of Middle Earth, which is about as engaging as the small print on the back of your gas bill, and your first hint that old JRR might have been a bit too much into all this stuff.

Still, it’s a phase that’s worth going through. Though, as my English teacher said upon seeing me reading The Lord Of The Rings: “Careful, that could be Hobbit forming.”