Tomorrow, I will be sitting in an airport lounge with my dearest friends – Mr White, Mr Blonde, Mr Blue, Mr Orange, and Mr Pink. It’s my stag do, and the theme is Reservoir Dogs. There are a few more of us than in the movie, so we had to improvise the code names (Mr Magenta is in there somewhere) and we’re off to Iceland to wreak havoc and surely damage the new suits everyone’s turned up in. This is all the brainchild of my best man, Mr White – who also happens to be my dad. At this point, dear reader, there might be two questions popping up in your head – why is your dad your best man (a question I get a lot), and why a movie-themed stag?

The first answer is simple – I’m very close to my dad and couldn’t think of anyone who’s been through (or rather, bailed me out of) more scrapes over the years that would more suit the title. The second question? Well, it might seem strange to some, but just like John Cusack arranging his records in autobiographical order in the film High Fidelity, I can chart my life through the love of movies.

Starting off in my teens, where most people were sneaking into pubs and ‘discovering’ girls, I was sneaking into late night screenings at the BFI Southbank and discovering obscure movie artefacts in Planet Hollywood. Christmas presents were regularly a bundle of DVDs and renewed subscriptions to Empire, Total Film and all the other film magazines I ‘needed’, and bunking off school usually meant the 1.30pm showings at North Finchley’s multiplex. What stands apart from them all however, came a little bit later, when I was at university, and when, for my 21st birthday, I held a memorable film-themed fancy dress party. Being known as the film buff, everyone went to some effort to turn up as movie characters past and present, with me at the centre as a rather drunken Luke Skywalker (complete with dyed blonde hair).

I sang along to the song Danger Zone from Top Gun, with my friend James, memorably wearing a fat suit with a tutu stretched over it, a creation he called ‘Billy Elliot: The Later Years’. As a way to mark one of the more notable birthdays, it was very ‘me’, Given all this movie history running through my life, sitting in the departure lounge of an airport with sunglasses on, answering to the name Mr Brown (Tarantino’s character in the film – yes I am that much of a fan!) doesn’t seem that odd at all. Everyone has a movie that means something to them – something you saw with your partner on your first date, a movie you watch over and over with your family (for me and Mr White it was the Arnie classic Predator).

In that sense, we all chart some points in our lives through cinema, it’s just film fans do it more extensively than most.