DO THE NAMES Adrian Slade, Hugo Rodallega or Wilhelm Furtwängler’s Piano Quintet in C mean anything to you? If even one of them registers, then I have news for you. Whether it is good or bad news is, I suppose, a moot point: you are a friend of mine for life.

If you know about all three, then something truly weird has happened. Someone must have been cloning embryos more than 40 years ago, when I was born.

I tell you this not because I wish to use The Times to find new friends, but because this week I realised something that many people have known for ages. I am really quite weird.

What I am about to reveal next is obvious, if not from my name then at least from the accompanying mugshot. I am a man. And when I say I am weird, what I really mean is that I am a man.

A few months ago I read a fascinating book by Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge. He will no doubt recoil in horror at my caricature of his book, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, but the basic message I took from it is that men have more “systematic” personalities and women have more “empathic” personalities. The book concentrates on autism as an extreme example of this in men.

Yes, I thought, this all makes sense. After all, Nick Hornby wrote a bestseller, High Fidelity, based on men’s penchant for making lists. I’m sure most men recognised themselves in the book’s theme. But it was only when I spotted Adrian Slade in Bloomsbury on Monday that I realised just how true it is.

Along with a couple of friends, I have a rather sad interest in long-forgotten political figures. A few years ago, for instance, I met the Mayor of Oakland,

California. I cannot come close to conveying to you the sheer excitement I felt. The reason? In a former incarnation, he was Governor of California — Jerry Brown, or Governor Moonbeam as he was then known.

Mr Slade, as if you didn’t know, was the last president of the Liberal Party, from 1987 to 1988. Sitting on a bus and spying him out of the window hardly compares, but it nonetheless merited an immediate email to my friends, both of whom understood the frisson I felt.

I know. I did say I was weird.

The Piano Quintet in C is a different matter. It may be part of another obsession — obscure recordings of classical music — but it is at least culturally respectable. Wilhelm Furtwängler is, I would argue, the greatest conductor ever. He also composed, but his pieces were rarely performed, let alone recorded. So when I discovered last week that there is a new CD of his chamber music, I was ecstatic. Most normal classical music obsessives would not even be aware of its existence, let alone care.

As for Hugo Rodallega, he is a Colombian footballer who plays for Club de Futbol Atlas in Mexico. But that’s not how he fits in. This week I was having lunch, and my companion and I discovered halfway through that we have both wasted innumerable hours playing a computer game, Football Manager. In the game, I manage Spurs and Hugo Rodallega is my top scorer. My companion is a Manchester United fan, and so much does he care about his team, and the computer game, that he refuses to pretend to be that club’s manager, lest he be sacked. By a computer programme. In a completely made-up game.

I may have such weird obsessions, but I like to think I am at least relatively normal. Other men have different obsessions, but obsessions they most certainly have. Can you, however, imagine any normal woman behaving like this? Caring — really, really caring — about being sacked in a computer game? Men. Weird.

• A MONTH AGO, the road outside my flat was closed for a week. It was inconvenient but worth it. The surface was relaid and we, and all the environs, ended up with a lovely smooth new road.

  Yesterday I got a letter from Thames Water, informing me that it is replacing the Victorian water tunnels where I live. It will take months and cause disruption, but everyone knows it has to be done.

  And so it has begun. By digging up the bright, smooth, shiny road, laid no doubt at great expense, a month ago. Isn’t Britain wonderful?

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