The Smiths were perfectly happy to tell me their millennium plans if I would tell them what name I would use to disguise them. What would they like, I wondered? "Well, possibly the most common name in the London telephone directory," they said.
Actually the most frequent listing is for the name Patel, but this wouldn't do for Bunty and Jock, they said ruefully, so we called them the Smiths. "It would send out all the wrong signals if you called us Patel," Jock said.
"Not that he's racist," Bunty said hastily.
He's right, they are not Pakistani, they are Home Counties English, a couple who wear industrial strength waterproof jackets and boots, to walk in the rain with their red setter. They have half a pint of cider each in their local every day.
Bunty does a lot of charity work, rather too, much people say, since their only son was killed in a climbing accident. Jock is 15 years retired but he works like a demon in his garden, and he's on a few local committees too. They are fit and healthy and in their 70s.
They always thought this would be the time when their son Mark would bring home a wife and they would move out of the big house and into the little cottage at the gate. Mark and this girl would then give them two wonderful grandchildren, a boy and a girl who would live in the next millennium and maybe go to the moon one day.
Jock often looked up at the moon and said that his grandson would go there sure as anything. But Mark died on a mountain slope at the age of 24 before he had found any girlfriend to fit in with the plans his parents had made.
And it's very different now when Bunty looks at the big house and wonders should they sell it, just keeping a little garden; and when Jock looks up at the moon where little Smith feet will never tread. But they are determined, cheerful folk who keep going and don't tell people their woes.
They are very comfortably off. Shortly before he would have retired anyway Jock's company was bought out leaving him with a much larger nest-egg than he would ever have thought possible. So at the age of 60, they decided to travel and see the world - and they have indeed seen some marvellous places.
They describe themselves as cruisers - except that Jock frowns and says that has another meaning nowadays - and they have been on a trip up from Seattle through all the glaciers and fjords of Alaska. They have been in the South Pacific to Tonga and Samoa, they've gone on a garden cruise which even went up the river in Waterford, and saw gardens all over the place in Ireland, before sailing off to the Shetlands. These are serious cruisers. They haven't ever had a "thing" about New Year's Eve. The year after Mark was killed they sat and looked each other while bells rang and hooters sounded, and they agreed they would never do that again. So they would go out to a local restaurant, or to friends.
But the millennium is something so big that it has to be marked. And there's no point in saving all their money for nothing and nobody. Instead they will go on a spectacular cruise. They have been in touch with some of the people they met on board ship in past years, and everyone knows of a truly splendid millennium cruise - at a price.
The most ambitious they have heard of is the Union Castle one that leaves Southampton on December llth, l999, and goes in a stately manner all the way down to Capetown and up through the Indian Ocean back through the Suez canal, stopping at dozens of places on the way until they get home in mid-February. Bunty thinks it might be a bit long, Jock thinks that rich and all as they are it might be a bit pricey at £15,000 each.
There's another holiday that a lot of their cruising friends are considering: eight nights in Russia, in St Petersburg, with the Big Night itself being spent driving in a troika to a masked ball at Pushkin's Palace. Jock thinks it might be a bit fancy, you know, arty in a way, not quite the thing the chaps in Rotary would do. Bunty says it's not a cruise, that's its main fault.
There's a seven-night music cruise on the Danube that takes in that millennium New Year's Eve. Bunty wonders would it be cold. Jock admits that he's tone deaf. There's a nice one to the Nile leaving London on December 27th. You fly to Luxor and get on one of the Thomas Cook Nile fleets. That might be great.
"It's too short," says Jock. Bunty agrees, they'd only be there when it's time to go back. There's a nice one down by Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula, on the Caledonian Star, but it does say "see in the New Year at Port Stanley in the Falklands". That doesn't sound very festive. "Not that Lady Thatcher wasn't wonderful through it all," Jock says hastily. "But of course she won't be there herself in Port Stanley," Bunty says, in case there might be any misunderstanding. She says it's amazing once you start telling people of exotic plans, you unsettle them, they think their own are dull. There's a tour of India for example: the Far Pavilions of Rajasthan with New Year's Eve at Udaipur, which has white marble palaces, blue lakes and green hills. It's not a cruise, but it is 16 days for £3,000 each. It's a possibility.
Those are only the recommendations that they have got from fellow cruisers. There will be many, many travel brochures to read and discuss as they sit wearing their tweed sleeveless jackets in their sitting room. A room where the photograph of the dead Mark smiles at them from the piano that only he ever played.
They are not travelling in some desperate flight from reality, they are interested in seeing the world in the time that is left to them. They have scrapbooks, albums and memories from the places they have been already. They have brave smiles and hopeful hearts. It's a wonderful thing to be alive at the change of a century, and doubly blessed to witness the change over of one thousand years into another. Their eagerness and enthusiasm would make you feel uncelebratory and dull if you didn't think up something a bit spectacular yourself. Even though I haven't a notion of going to these places, I'm tempted to look at what's on offer.