And a Happy New Millennium to you all! Hopefully the Year 2000 bug didn't cause too much havoc, the city centres are by now unblocked, you can once again book a place to eat lunch in central London and that huge rotary wheel thing has not slid expensively back into the Thames.
I am writing this at the end of a bleak, damp November, with January still a long way away and the millennial buzz still going strong. There's a fair bit of future-gazing going on and some of the tabloids are filling space the easy way, speculating what the millennial world will look like. I shall be very surprised if G.K. Chesterton is proved wrong: he predicted that the future will look very similar to the present. It would be nice if it did not. The 20th century is sliding to a bloody end, with a disturbing similarity in the headlines of today and those of the first decade of the century. But the odds are that three noughts at the end of the calendar will not make us happier people.
Network
Looking back, at times like these, is often more encouraging than looking forward. In a recent bout of nostalgia, I was struck by how little is really new. Take the Internet: back in the Middle Ages there was a global network in place, where every village was linked to every town by an invisible network, where news and entertainment were disseminated by the same all-pervasive organisation that exercised a profound influence on society and individuals. That global network was the Christian church, and the comparison is by no means frivolous.
