Return of the Great White Nerd

Men change when their partners are away. It's true! I think we simply revert to type. The Don Juans of yore go out and sleaze up to the dumb young things, old jocks crash out on the sofa with a six pack of Coors and the rugby, and the earnest not-so-young-anymore professionals - well, they never have much of a life outside the office.

I go geek.

Sometimes it's the slightly more socially acceptable side of geekery. I wander around on of London's museums for a while, or chill out at the cinema (all day - that's what makes it geeky).

And sometimes, like this weekend, I go deep geek. With a side of domestic.

My itinerary for the past 48 hours:

• Stay late at work on Friday playing Civilisation IV (which is very good, as you're about to discover). Just make the last tube out of London to get home around 1.30
• Stay up another 2 hours reading a sci-fi novel
• Wake up at 11, get up at 12, clean the house for 4 hours
• Play Civ4 again, with brief pauses to heat a lasagne ready meal and press Record on the VCR to snaffle Heavenly Creatures (my favourite Peter Jackson movie) for posterity
• Go to bed this morning around 11am - yup, I pulled an all-nighter on Civ. First time since university
• Wake up at 3.30 this afternoon, get up at 4 and clean the house some more (it was really messy, okay?). Scratch another 2 hours
• Prepare some books for BookCrossing with the new plates¹ and stamp I bought specifically for the purpose
• And then blog about it all!

I'm not proud of this admission, but not particularly embarrassed either. It just struck me how deeply geeky it all was.

¹pretty, isn't it?