2010

For the Swiss Family Shanks it arrived without much fanfare, a 3month old baby tends to subdue your appetite for a party.

10 years ago though we drank, we sang and waited with baited breath for the toasters to attack and planes to fall out of the sky. With retrospect it might sound melodramatic but back then I would rather have faced an angry Somalian wielding a machete, with a hangover having just heard a rumour that I had buggered his wife than be sat on a plane as the clocks moved over into the new millennium.

We took the millennium bug seriously, very seriously indeed.

The noughties have passed in a blink of an eye.
Granted it was a very long blink but for me the fact that a whole ten years have passed since I stood there staring blurry eyed at the rainy Glasgow sky spotted with fireworks is simply incredible. If I list everything that has passed through my life it sort of adds up, the life changes which have occurred to me, the career achievements and failures, the children, the travel, the friends found and lost - I found my soul mate in the Noughties.

Still it’s gone fast.

I do hate the name the “Noughties” though, sounds like a kids’ TV show, why not the "Two thousands, or the “Twentyhundrends”? What did the people call the years 1900 – 1909? Probably nothing. I believe it is a relatively modern phenomena to give a decade a label, I am guessing this annoying trend stems from the sixties and the baby boomer`s desire to give that special decade a label and a cute habit was formed. We do like to label things now though. A good example of this is the flurry of “new” diseases which have magically appeared in the noughties which simply did not exist before - even in the 1990s. Bipolar disorder, MRSA, Swine Flu, Bird Flu to name just four of these "so called diseases".

I can’t remember anyone calling in sick during the 90s with Swine Flu can you? No of course not. Back then we simply had a cup of tea, or took an E and got on with whatever we were getting on with. I accept if it was the E then it probably wasn't very productive, but we definitely had a smile on our face and there was no complaining.

Does this mean we have become softer in the last ten or so years?

Judging by the way the UK is bravely coping with the current inclement weather, probably. This is the country which gave the world Churchill, Nelson, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, John Lennon, The Raj, America, William Wallace, football, tennis and cricket. We conquered, we defeated, we led, we stole, we built ships, we invented cities, the telephone, TV and penicillin.

We have become an anaesthetized shadow of our former selves, closer resembling our Gallic neighbours than the generation of our grandparents.

The solution?

Drag ourselves up out of our sickly bedshed beds, stop trying to capture nostalgia, drive to the pub regardless of the weather and do what we do best: have a drink or six and start a fight with someone.