If only Bilbo Baggins had never left home, says Sharon Griffiths, who prefers a cold shower to reading Tolkien.

FIRST Harry Potter and next the Lord of the Rings - prepare for wizard overload. The first film of the three part Tolkien epic is released later this month and then Radio 4 is re-running their 13-hour version of it in the New Year. The merchandise has already hit the shelves.

It's enough to make anyone long for a ring of invisibility and deafness to avoid it all.

JRR Tolkien has a lot to answer for. Yes, I read the Lord of the Rings when I was about 14, devoured all three books, The Hobbit and the rest, and loved them passionately. Read them again at 18 and loved them again.

By then they had become cult reading. It was the Sixties of peace and love and flower power and everyone wanted to turn into hobbits or elves or wizards. You couldn't walk in the park without tripping over a dog called Gandalf or Frodo. Hippy squats were named Rivendell - usually scrawled above the door in drippy yellow paint. A friend of a friend called her twins Aragorn and Arwen - and I bet, as thirty-somethings now, they've long since re-named themselves.

It being the Sixties, none of us was in the real world half the time anyhow and Lord of the Rings made it easier. Everyone's walls featured strange posters of imaginary worlds. Elvish music was the background to parties. There was always a hint, somehow, of strange magic in the air. It went with the smell of joss-sticks. It was the time of folk music and songs about wizards and witches. The mythical ideas spread. Dungeons and Dragons. We were all playing games in another world. We were living in fairy stories.

I grew up, got a job, moved on with my life. Sometime in my late twenties, at home with flu and having re-read Pride and Prejudice for the twentieth time, I reached instead for Lord of the Rings.

It was awful. Dreadful. Almost unreadable. Tolkien was an academic, lectured on Anglo Saxon, Middle English. He knew about language and he invented a few for his books. While he was at it, he invented history and mythology too. Not just the bits he needed for the books, but the entire background. He created not just another world, but another universe. And, in his role as creator, had planted in there too the seeds of corruption. It was an amazing achievement.

And incredibly boring.

I just cannot understand how I ever liked it. The language, for a start, is that awful inverted high-sounding style in which old-fashioned fairy stories were written when we were young. E.g. "Venerable he seemed as a king crowned with many winters and yet hale as a tried warrior in the fullness of his strength."

Tolkien was thinking in Anglo Saxon but the rest of us have moved on a bit in the last thousand years..

And the characters... oh, the hobbits are quite fun. But the enemies and the adventures go on and on and on and on. So you just long for them to find those blessed rings and get shot of them so they can go home and smoke their pipes and have their six meals a day.

And the battles and ordeals... there are so many of them, so much heroism, so many devious tricks, so many triumphs and set-backs, so many recuperations from battles. It's worse than reading the sports pages. It's a bit like reading a whole decade of football reports in one indigestible lump and as about as rewarding.

Substitute the FA Cup for the rings, orcs for West Ham and the hobbits for a plucky little non league club and you're about there. Yawn.

And that maybe is the key to the boredom. There are very few women in Lord of the Rings. It's a lads' thing. Tolkien himself was happily married, devoted to his wife, a loving father to four children. And yet his books are almost entirely masculine worlds. Strong on camaraderie and comradeship, on pints of beer and pipes of tobacco, but not so hot on the everyday intimacies of relationships and certainly not with women.

Newly-married, he had to leave his wife to go off and fight in the First World War. The grimness of that time never left him and it shows.

But now the film is on its way and the Tolkien fan club is going to be bigger than ever. We shall have Gandalf Games and Bilbo T-shirts and Frodo Baggins lunch boxes. And more rings than in the Olympic years.

People will once more try to escape into another world of Elvish lords and magic swords, of orcs and dwarves and quests. And maybe that's my biggest complaint.

Tolkien's world is indeed a marvellous creation. But it's still not as interesting or as varied or as colourful as the real world we live in. So why bother?

Best just stick to the sports pages. Or Jane Austen.