Millennial fever has begun to take hold in a big way as the start of a new year brings us nearer to the magic year 2000.
Of course it's been building for a while. For a few years now, every restaurant in central London has been fully booked for late dinners on 31 December 1999; and predictions of worldwide economic collapse, as the 'millennium' bug makes millions of computerised businesses a hundred years out of date, has practically entered modern folklore. Artists and architects argue endlessly over the Millennium Dome; there is grief and glory in dozens of planning offices as applications to the Lottery Fund for millennium projects are granted or denied; and quite a few of us older people are wondering exactly what is in the Blue Peter time capsule.
Fundamental problem
The fundamental problem in all this is much too academic to give pause for thought. It is that nobody actually knows when the millennium is going to be. Mathematicians and calendar-buffs argue the relative merits of 2000 and 2001; anyone with a smattering of biblical background knows that the birth of Jesus has already passed its 2,000th anniversary; and people who care nothing for maths or Bibles, but want to maximise the celebrations, are already planning complicated journeys across international date-lines so they can have a new millennium every hour or so.
