It was a colleague who first pointed out the trend and while she has proved absolutely correct, I almost wish she hadn't. I am now driven mad on an almost daily basis and the horrible truth is, it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'm talking, of course, about the teethgritting effects of millennium guff - why at this stage I can hardly type the word, having forbidden myself from using it in print several months ago. Now I know it's become terribly trendy to appear laconic and blasee about the approaching new year's celebrations.
Having given ourselves hives with excitement a year ago, when it first dawned on most of us that the year 2000 AD was less a name of a comic and more a massive excuse to have a party, it now seems that many of us peaked too early. I seem to remember reeling off wonderful plans to count down the minutes while standing on my head in a yurt in Katmandu, or was that counting down the minutes while drinking champagne on the fictitious yacht of a fictitious sugar daddy I would no doubt have found by then?
Either way, like most people I presumed that I was going to do something terribly original and exotic. But after months of media hype about groups of Texan millionaires buying New Zealand and the Ritz Hotel having been booked out by William the Conquerer, I find the thought of organising anything for December 31st rather draining.
I'm quite sure that something will come along, which is a policy that works perfectly well for me every weekend. Still I find the millennium malaise a bit naff too. It's all a bit too easy to moan about the ridiculous price of babysitters and taxis, or to quibble about the fact that it's all quite arbitrary and really 1/1/2000 is just another set of numbers imposed on temporality by short-sighted Arabs. Or something.
When really it's still quite impressive, in a boasting-at-parties-in-30-years-time kind of way, that we will have been part of a very small group of people to have ever seen two different millenniums. Admittedly this is the only really impressive thing about it, bar the possibility that all the crazed millenarians are right and we are about to explode into fragments the size of Rice Krispies, but I think it's a pretty good claim to posterity nonetheless.
So unlike many people, it's not the millennium hype as such that annoys me, it's the way in which the M word is being tagged onto almost everything these days.
Just this week I have noticed five incidences of it: in a book catalogue, a literary journal, a fashion magazine, a newspaper editorial and a boating manual (don't ask). Despite the wide range of offenders, each incidence is remarkably similar and goes something like this: "As we move towards the next millennium, more houses than ever are being made from bricks" or "With the next millennium only months away, it's time to start thinking about oarlocks".
I mean, what? The sheer nonsensical nature of these statements deserves a counterattack of many, many prongs. For a start, it never seems to mean anything; it's a blanket term that allows people to get away with making a completely random statement while sounding as though they have put long hard thought into the current state of humankind.
A feature by poet Jamie McKendrick in the current issue of W, the Waterstone's magazine, is a perfect example. In a tone of great quizzical angst, Jamie ponders the fact that "With the millennium almost upon us, the poetry world seems to have gone anthology mad." Jamie, Jamie, Jamie love, what has the year 2000 got to do with books of poetry? And if you are stating that the turn of the century has influenced the creation of anthologies surely you should explain yourself further?
The fact is, the phrase has little to do with McKendrick's article - the millennium connection was probably just tacked on because a sub-editor thought it gave the piece a bit of jazzy oomph. August's Vogue is guilty of a yet more insidious use of the M banality. In one feature on the use of silver this season they tell us "Y2K is just around the corner, and designers aren't letting us forget it" while in the catwalk report in the same issue they inform us that "With Y2K looming, you might have expected enough space-age clothes to dress the entire cast of the next Star Wars epic. The reality however was rather different."
Now, while we all know that the lovely fluffy people in fashion don't have to obey the same rules of syntax, manners or logic as the rest of us, this is a very interesting proposition. That they've contradicted themselves entirely is completely forgiveable (it's a fashion moment) but what they have also done is shown just how the millennium statement can be used to say just about anything. In other words, it means absolutely nothing while pretending to sound terribly profound. If the media are to be believed, everything from poetry to fashion to boats to birdseed is radically changing in nature due to the approaching date change. What an alarming thought - it would make you want to start watching paint dry or pots boil just in case they too were somehow altering their essential drying-ness and boiling-ness owing to the millennium.
It's not true though. The only change I've observed is that the media and the travel industry are getting over-excited in exact correlation to the under-excitement growing in everybody else - as the millennium approaches.
If the truth be known, "as we hurtle towards the millennium" is just like one of those phrases that your Irish or French teacher made you learn off as you hurtled towards your Leaving Cert, like "In times gone by . . ." or "Given the current political climate. . ." - handy, made you sound as though you knew what you were talking about and completely meaningless. Now there's a scary thought - imagine the poor folk correcting all those Irish Leaving Cert scripts as we speak, wading through constant repetitions of "As the millennium looms" as Gaelige.