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My mother warned me
I have always been extremely sceptical of anything millennial
H ARD to believe though it may be, there were many people who were genuinely worried last week that the world might come to an end today, as predicted by Nostradamus. In the midst of all this fuss, I was reminded of my poor mother, whose nanny was convinced that the end was nigh. Not only did she terrify my mother with this prospect; she gave it a precise date. I don't think her calculations had anything to do with Nostradamus; she was some sort of Christian fundamentalist, though other surviving relations may disagree, as families usually do about such stories. Anyhow, when my mother was still a little girl, a day dawned when her nanny told her that the latter day had arrived, and that she was to dress up warmly and come quickly to the top of a nearby hill, to await the wrath to come in penitential prayer.
After a considerable time of anxious apprehension, even the nanny had to admit that she must have got the wrong day, and my mother was allowed to come down the hill and return home. But that was not all. On at least one other occasion, and perhaps more - there is always something vague and incomplete in such accounts - the nanny repeated the performance, leading my mother up the same hill, with the same results. If this story is true, and I have no reason to think otherwise, it is really hardly surprising that my mother was prone to fits of cynicism in later life and joined the Communist Party at a tender age, if only briefly.
Partly, perhaps, because of my mother's early experiences, I have always been extremely sceptical of anything millennial. And for months, for years, I have been saying to myself that the present millennium fever is perfectly ridiculous. It would never, I felt sure, infect me, even though I am just as worried about when the invitations are going to start arriving as anybody else - anybody else who hasn't got one, that is. For one thing, I am not a Christian, another indirect result of my mother's nanny millennial hysteria, which so blighted my mother's religious sensibilities that she was unable to encourage any in her children. For another thing, I have never enjoyed ordinary New Year celebrations very much; I don't like the feeling that one ought to be enjoying oneself on prescribed occasions, least of all on evenings when it is impossible to get a baby sitter. (I don't count Christmas because one is not required to enjoy oneself, merely to be nice.) And for yet another thing, arbitrarily rounded-off date concepts, such as the swinging Sixties or the 19th-century mind, are clearly largely meaningless.
Yet I find I have been wrong. There is something about such a solemn sounding date as the year 2000 that does insinuate itself into the imagination. It makes one take stock, something best avoided usually, as it tends to be depressing; it certainly depresses me. One reader told me that he thought I write best in a mood of lamentation, which is depressing in itself. And it is true that looking back over this passing century there is plenty to lament. However, I would prefer to think of what seems promising about the century to come.
Cumbersome and irritating though it is, the Internet must be one of the best hopes for the future. Designed to enable people to communicate with each other in the absence of any central control, it is the best and the most powerful weapon against central control - against statism . Socialism may have been finally discredited, at the end of the 20th century, but statism, and statist impulses, are much harder to destroy. The Internet is the natural enemy of statism, and of corporatism, and it is the servant of freedom. No doubt it will quickly become much easier to use, and the technophobia that even today prevents people from using it will soon seem incomprehensible, as computers become less primitive and unreliable. The biological sciences too offer enormous hope for the future, and they too are suddenly emerging from a primitive state into a time of dazzling exponential growth. I hope I live long enough to see some of the miracles - as they would seem to the millennium that is passing - which genetics and brain science will certainly achieve in the next. Space exploration interests me personally much less, but it is still a wonderful thing that the eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens us no longer, but seems instead to offer infinite possibilities. I agree that none of this will seem any nearer at breakfast on January 1, 2000, than it was at tea time on December 31, especially as most people will have done absolutely nothing in the interval. But for those of us inclined to pessimism, it is worth remembering that the end really is not at hand.
IT occurred to me not long ago that I have been writing this column for more than six years. Before that I was writing a similar column on a different page, which makes 10 years. That is a long time. I have hugely enjoyed your letters, most of them at least, since most of them have been instructive, witty and kind; I hope and think I have replied to almost all of them. I have also very much enjoyed writing here, and having the freedom of this space. All the same, I have come to feel that it is time for me to stop and to do different kinds of writing. So this is my last column here. I hope to write some longer pieces occasionally in The Sunday Telegraph: I am working on a one at the moment, and may perhaps write more book reviews. But I think that after so long in this space, it is time for me, at least, to come to a final full stop.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 04, 1999
