What were you doing this time 10 years ago?

It’s started. Oh god. It’s started. Nooooooooooo.

My head being crushed by a cold, I was innocently surfing the Guardian website on Friday when I came across this, an introduction to a review of the noughties. Aside from causing me to hate the word ‘noughties’ even more, it made me swear very loudly and write an angry Facebook update.

I wonder why it jolted me so much. For me, the current decade didn’t really start until about 2003 at least. And then it got me thinking about 10 years ago. Christ. For me, 1999 was a chaos of wrong turns and butterflies ballroom dancing in Tonga, seemingly for my sole benefit. How can I forget all the media roundups that were thrown at us as 1999 came to a close, ushering in not only the millennium, but what was to be one of the worst years of my life.

And now the tide of decadeist reflection has begun, and isn’t going to stop for another, what, three months. Of course, one way to fend off the sense of doom is for me to write some decade review stuff of my own, I guess.

So what have we got now? Before New Year’s Eve 1999, people overbought in Sainsbury’s due to fear of the Millennium Bug. Now people are spending, or being asked to spend, exponentially more due to global warming, which really has no time limit on it. The chicken korma-dipped, bleached bunny porn star look for women was still a tiny bit ironic 10 years ago, but now it’s ubiquitous and almost obligatory. Now ordinary people have flatscreen TVs mounted on the wall. iPods. Broadband. 1TB+ drives. All driven by porn, as was technology in the previous two decades.

Remind me, what else is there?