Walkie talkie

A few months before the Noughties began, I was walking down Las Ramblas in Barcelona with my then boss, and he started talking and chuckling to himself, then shouting in French. I really thought he’d gone mad, until I realised he had one of those new-fangled hands-free, in-ear phone thingies; the first time I’d ever seen one. (Or not seen one, which is part of their appeal, I suppose.)

Then, 10 years on, a few months before the Noughties ended, I was in Marks & Spencer in Croydon when I saw a man coming down the escalator, talking to himself. I presumed he had one of those by-now-tediously-ubiquitous hands-free, in-ear phone thingies; and then I realised, no, he was just mad.

That, I think, goes part of the way to summing up the decade. Not my journey from Barcelona to Croydon (there’s another tale entirely) but the extent to which things that so recently were startling, almost uncanny, have so quickly become ordinary, unremarkable. And how often we forget the people who get lost down the cracks that those changes leave behind.

And as the Noughties finally trundles towards oblivion, it would seem a good time to bid farewell, although I may pop up with a few relevant nuggets in the coming months; for one thing I’ll almost certainly be nagging you to watch BBC2’s History of Now, which begins next week. If you’ve purchased my book, thank you, and if you’ve read it, even better. Why not tell us what you thought of it, either here, or at Amazon, Waterstone’s, Book Depository or the like? If you haven’t yet done so, from tomorrow you’ll have the perfect perspective from which to tell me how utterly wrong I really was about the decade, since it will finally have made the transition from Current Affairs to History. I always intended the book not to be a definitive statement, but the opening salvo in a debate, an argument, a conversation.

Over to you.

Unspeak

Perhaps we should just call the decade unnerving or unsettling or even unhinged.
—The BBC’s Matt Frei puts the Noughties to bed.

The decade as disaster movie

Toby Young on the way death and destruction became a sort of Noughties pornography:

One of the most striking things about the Noughties is that when terrible things did happen – when planes really did start falling out of the sky – we greeted them with barely concealed excitement... it was the way these phenomena were latched on to, the apocalyptic fantasies they gave rise to. It was as if people wanted the world to be consumed in an orgiastic frenzy of ultra-violence, whether at the hand of Mother Nature or an Islamist cell in possession of a ‘dirty bomb’.

Wrong ’uns

What’s it like to have your obituary written when you’re still alive, and then to find out that everyone hated you? Check out the people who ruined the Noughties.

The darnedest things

A slightly different perspective on the Noughties: the decade according to people who’ve known no other:

The decade according to 9-year-olds from allison louie-garcia on Vimeo.

Objectification

Although many of us lived the Noughties in a virtual haze of ones and zeroes, there was still a lot of stuff around. At the BBC magazine, style guru Peter York pinpoints the objects of the decade.

Events, dear boy

On the BBC site, I muse about the big news stories of the decade, and wait for the punters to weigh in with theirs. Wondering how many will be brave enough to suggest anything other than 9/11.

Next!

It took us a long time to settle on ‘The Noughties’ as the label for the decade, and there are still plenty of people who aren’t convinced. Not surprisingly, there’s no consensus on where we’ll be from the beginning of next month. Here’s one Australian suggestion: The One-ders.

Not convinced? OK then, what do you suggest we call it?

Tinker, tailor...

I knew as I began to write The Noughties that my main problem would be one of perspective; because we were still in the midst of the decade, it would be very difficult to achieve any kind of objectivity. Eventually, I realised that, although I hoped to be fair and accurate, whatever I wrote could only be subjective. It was a snapshot, a conversation-starter, inescapably bound up in my own life and prejudices and interests and circumstances.

But still most of the media commentators seem to be under the delusion that they can provide some kind of all-seeing eye to the decade, pinpointing empirical truths.

Here’s an exception; in The Independent, 10 people – a banker, a doctor, a soldier and more – explain what the decade meant to them, and just to them. It may not be ‘The Truth’, but it’s honest.

Hug this

From hoodies to Bernie Madoff, Intelligent Life gets to grips with what defined the decade. And also a reminder that the decade ain’t over until its over, as demonstrated by Julia Peyton-Jones’s contribution:

Think of Dubai and what it represents: the idea that things can appear out of nowhere as if ready-made: it didn’t exist a moment ago and now here it is, fully formed. And what underpins this is the thing that underpins everything else: the pound or dollar sign.

Oops.

Nothing doing

In the Mirror, Brian Reade lays into the decade:

Looking back on it is almost as painful as looking at 40 photos of the office bore’s new baby. From the opening non-event in the Millennium Dome and the opening story, the Millennium Bug, it’s been 10 years of scares and scams. From jihad to Jedward, a decade that effectively started with a bang (9/11) and ended with a twitter.

What a Decade That Was

I’ll be discussing the Noughties at the Frontline Club in London next Wednesday, December 2, at 7pm. More details here.

Full of it

A slightly jaded view of the Noughties, the title of which tells you all you need to know.

How could we forget William Hung?

Again from the extraordinary link machine that is the lovely Miss Peel: Newsweek offers an excellent – if overwhelmingly Americentric – video overview of the past decade.

I will try to prefix you

The French writer Camille de Toledo endeavours to sum up the Noughties in his intriguing tome Coming of Age at the End of History (translated by Blake Ferris):

...But reality had lost the ability to examine itself through anything more significant than a prefix. The dominant spirit of the present has banished the image of cyclical time, of revolutionary time, and it now only dreams of a future covered in endless shades of gray. Instead of the radically new, all we’ve got is the cycle of fashion, seasonal novelty. A universe of tiny little variations on the same thing, just with more beats, more bass notes and more nothingness. The novelty item! That’s why we keep going back to music stores, to newsstands, to supermarkets and to bookstores. Post, post, post, after, after, after, new, new, new, neo, neo, neo. The whole bundle of prefixes is repeated with the incantatory passion of a high priestess in heat. Maybe sometimes with good intentions, but IN VAIN!

Good as far as it goes... except, when did you last set foot in a music store?

Looking back at looking back

At Spiked, Patrick West suggests that The Noughties was defined by nostalgia for the Nineties, Eighties, Seventies...

No wonder Philip K Dick’s stories have become so popularised in cinematic form - in the guise of Minority Report (2002) and A Scanner Darkly (2008), which are both paranoid paeans to the past, and to the future. And no wonder Danny Dyer’s fake cockneyism has become popularised in a time when we all long for the ‘good old days’ when West Ham, Millwall and Chelsea fans could kick the shit out of each other. No wonder the backward-looking Life On Mars was a success. Even Dr Who has a decidedly retro feel about it. Yesterday and Dave and various Discovery and History channels have become successful avenues, and with good reason. The Noughties has been an epoch of endless re-remembering.

I'm guessing not

On BBC3 at 21:00 (and repeated several times thereafter, and on iPlayer, and probably soon to be available in suppository form) The Noughties... Was That It?

Will get back to you later with the unsolicited answer to that presumably rhetorical question.

[UPDATE: Well, since the talking-heads style Top-100 format was one of the definitive televisual forms of the decade, maybe It Was. I must admit to being slightly miffed that I wasn’t asked to contribute, but Will Self pretty much spoke on my behalf, especially when it came to The Da Vinci Code. And to clarify, it’s not undergoing multiple repeats - this was simply Part One of four programmes. What’s the betting that 9/11 is #1?]

Baggy trousers

What went wrong in the Noughties: a South African view:

The rise of social media is ironic at a time when the consumerist egomania of the eighties has enjoyed a revival. There’s a reason MC Hammer pants are back in fashion and it’s not just because Vogue says so.

Getting it wrong

Dominic Sandbrook in the Telegraph reminds us that any attempt to define a decade from the inside (whether this Noughties or the last one) may seem hilariously wrong-headed in retrospect:

A hundred years ago, our Edwardian predecessors were obsessed less by the danger of a world war than by the threat of political terrorism. And while the anarchist bomber cast a long shadow, other issues monopolised public attention in a way that now seems almost ludicrous. To the Edwardians, the great questions of the day were Home Rule for Ireland, the People’s Budget and the composition of the House of Lords. But when we look back, all we can see is the looming hulk of the First World War.

Was that it?

How was The Noughties for you? asks The Guardian. So tell them. But tell us as well.