This week I must tell you about my friends Roy and Paul, who suffer from GAS and BO respectively, but first I have to refute my family’s claims that I am “obsessed”.

My wife likes to say (usually when the light is still on at 1am) that I am “obsessed with that crossword book”, while my daughter tells me (after I tell her off for putting plastic in the wrong bin) that I am “obsessed with recycling”.

So I do think the word “obsessed” gets overused a lot these days, and to tell the truth, I don’t think I am obsessed with anything.

And I should know, because I know a few obsessives.

I play the drums, for instance, which means I have to rub shoulders with guitarists, and you don’t know the meaning of “obsession” until you know them.

Guitarists only want one thing in life: another guitar.

This is despite the fact that I have never met one, yet, who can play more than one at a time.

Not even Roy, whose band I used to play in.

He is a great player, and even teaches it, but he has always had a terrible problem with GAS.

That’s Guitar Acquisition Syndrome, which is a real thing, apparently, and causes its sufferers to be obsessed with buying more guitars, whether they need them or not.

That’s not to say all guitar players have GAS. It’s only about 90 per cent of them.

Roy owns at least 20, and I’m not including his banjos, ukuleles, mandolins and other things pretending to be guitars. He even has one with two necks. In recent years you could be excused for thinking he has cured himself, because he has stopped buying them, but that’s only because he has taken to making them.

Fortunately, I don’t play the guitar, and even though I have spent quite a few hours sitting on a drum stool, dangerously close to a few guitar players, I haven’t developed any obsessive symptoms yet, so I don’t think it’s catching.

Even more dodgy than hanging out with guitarists, however, is being in a cycle club.

Because cyclists have it even worse.

Take my friend Paul, for instance, who lives in a flat with his girlfriend and eight bikes, and has a serious case of BO (bike obsession).

Like guitarists, there isn’t a cyclist in the world who can use two bikes at once, but I know lots of them who own at least half a dozen. Yet they always talk about a new bike they have their eye on, and how many hundreds of pounds they would like to spend on it.

Mathematicians have even produced a formula to calculate the number of bikes that serious cyclists need to feed their craving, which is x+1, where x is the number they have now.

And if it isn’t the bike it’s the gadgets or clothes or parts, which they have incredibly intimate knowledge of, in stark contrast to me.

One cyclist friend recently asked me what sort of wheels I had on my bike, so I told him everything I know about them, which is: they’re round.

Don’t get me wrong. Far from knocking people for having an intense interest in something, I envy them.

It must be satisfying to become so immersed in something and always want to add to your enjoyment, and as I get older and retirement beckons, I do worry that I should be finding a hobby that I can get really absorbed in.

But when I told my wife this, she told me to stop over-thinking it.

Which is a polite way of telling me not to get obsessed about it.