Millennium Mystique

Q. Would I be right in thinking the millennium is just a white, European, bourgeois construct?

A. Absolutely. The majority of the world's population will not be joining the hyped-up celebrations for a date which has about as much significance as your car's odometer hitting 2000. Bravely leading the millennium refuseniks are the Chinese, who won't be ordering in the party hats for the very good reason that on their calendar it's the year 4698.

Adding to the critical mass are all the Islamic countries, where it is the year 1420, and large areas of India, Asia and Africa will remain similarly untouched by an event that is gearing up to get the Western world into a tizzy. All in all, around 3.8 billion people (two-thirds of the world's population) won't be celebrating the millennium in any shape or form. The rest of us, therefore, are in the minority.

There really is no escape though, and forget about seeking sanctuary on a mountain top - they will all be overrun by "spiritual" types, as will most of the famous global landmarks like the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids. Even staying at home won't be much good to you as television, radio and print media will be spewing out millennium information and retrospectives at a rate of knots.

If you're stuck in the Western world though, help is at hand: simply go to hell, or rather millennium hell, which you can find on your Y2K-compliant computer at the following address: www.millenniumhell.com. It's a new, weekly webzine which promises to bring a bit of sanity to millennial matters. Apart from offering a special support phoneline for people who just don't care about the millennium, it also features a "stupid prophecy" of the week, alongside ready-to-send email postcards that bear the legends "Have a Nice Doomsday" and "Greetings From Millennium Hell". These are fast becoming the must-have fashion accessories du jour.

The man behind it all, Dave Hernandez, says he designed the site simply as a form of light relief from all the po-faced pronouncements surrounding us this year. "With all the hype and hoopla, we felt millennium madness was ripe to be satirised," he says. "We're just having fun. And if the end of the century really does mean the end of the world as we know it, we want people to exit with a smile on their faces."

To his credit, Hernandez and his happy bunch of refuseniks have already targeted an area which is going to bore us rigid over the coming months: namely, the compilation of millennial lists - as in person of the millennium, event of the millennium, best soap opera death of the millennium etc. Getting in first with his shout, Hernandez thinks that in retrospect, it would have been a better millennium without: JeanClaude Van Damme, Mussolini, Spam, The Nielsen Ratings, Plague, Inflatable Furniture, The Cossacks and Up With People.

Under the heading "Hindsight is 20/20" we find: Beatmax, perms for men, the Starr report, the solar-powered car, the Crusades and Timothy Dalton as James Bond. And showing up strongly in the "How did they live without them in the first millennium" category are: democracy, electricity, pizza, Shakespeare, Gershwin, ATMs, the Larry Sanders Show and picture postcards.