00 ingredients

The 2000s in review [Kottke.org]

The 100 best films of the decade [according to The Times]

Top 100 albums of the ’00s [Resident Advisor]

Sleevey Wonder [one of the worst puns of the decade? thanks The Sun]

50 of the best jokes of the noughties [joke's on The Telegraph really]

Delia’s favourite noughties ‘recipe’ for antipasti [The Daily Mail caters for well-behaved housewives]

Leading swiftly to a round-up of the decade’s sex tapes [courtesy of The Huffington Post]

Top agricultural biodiversity reads of the decade [Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, obviously]

For people who don’t care that much about the music of the last decade [look away now]

… although the noughties are by definition OVER, this list can continue ad infinitum, just add comments below…

RE: the Noughties: MEMO [personal]

by Dan Jones

2000 – New year arrives in Bristol city centre, re-concreted for the millennium, to find shuffling teenage cattle equipped with two toke spliffs and plastic bottles of vodka mix; I don’t get to kiss the girl I did last year, but this isn’t the 90s anymore. Miss out on camping with the cooler kids at Glastonbury. By end of year get 10 GCSEs, a mobile phone and a girlfriend.

2001 – Lose virginity and fall in love (probably in that order). Go skittish round April when new girlfriend disappears on French exchange – listen to indie pop break-up songs, and ponder what an emotionally wrought break-up might be like (and how to write emotionally wrought indie pop break-up songs). Have acute encounter with own mortality sat on a toilet, drunk, in a cubicle at Bryanston school on last night of a wind-band course. By the end of the year I have Grade 8 clarinet and more earnest adolescent issues then I can knock out square with one punch.

2002 – Get A-Levels and having studiously avoided UCAS realise I need apply for University. Get job in Japanese noodlebar, eat lots of noodles, choose music as my raison d’etre and get place at Oxford.

2003 – Accept place at Oxford, finish working in noodle bar and take off for Cuba on March 16^th with girlfriend holding a sweaty shaking hand. Discover that world is beautiful, broad and widely impoverished, through medium of Latin America. Hottest summer of the decade spent back home throwing a Frisbee further every day. September arrives – girlfriend goes to University and one month later I arrive at Oxford, shake my Dad’s hand (no sweat) to start a new life. Two months later have more stories, more friends, and a bigger vocabulary.

2004 – Split-up with girlfriend but by summer am a neophyte drug user in white-tie and tails. Seductive summer holidays with new friends full of superlatives before tick-box trip to Eastern Europe (trains, beers, a well-thumbed guidebook) brings a handful of anecdotal sexual experiences. Improvise on this theme until December when I discover that pretty girls make you anxious when they don’t reply to your texts.

2005 – Discover that getting up at 3pm doesn’t always make you happy. Amidst much chicanery avoid doing any real work. Clubs and bars become quasi-domestic spaces. Join Facebook and get another girlfriend (not related). Quiet nights the exception that prove the rule.

2006 – Pariah status as I take a gap-year from University on spurious academic grounds. Break up with girlfriend as things get more sobering. Later that summer a sense that things-that-could-have-been-are-not leads to deposits in the memory bank in Paris and Spain; in Morocco attempt to help build classroom with spade, some money and lots of goodwill, but not enough cement (classroom left unfinished).

2007 – Climactic period of keepsake June segues to summer in Serbia, but somehow heart if not broken gets bruised. Move to London where a whole new game begins, and largely unemployed, fill days with little, and odd evenings with holding trays of champagne, cursing the day. By December life seems a difficult thing to be good at.

2008 – Become provider of second tier private schooling as tutor for  a clutch of London’s better off, less able youths in various smart-casual postcodes. Claim dole to buy coffees for free internet in free time – get two-day per week internship which pays in compliments and lunch. Have affair with women in her thirties, move to Cambridge for first proper job and join the leisure class on a tight budget.

2009 – Leave Cambridge and start to tell the hour with Big Ben, leaden circles advancing the days. By autumn my youth is given a once-over for crimes as am checked for suitability to serve the crown…batting for Britain…thinking of the pavilion. Parties are the exception that make the rule and having long-resisted the term ‘Noughties’ on various aesthetic and ideological grounds, start using it more and more.

I don’t know what to call this decade yet.