Missing decade

I have just been back to "Blighty" and had a huge trip down memory lane. The North End Lads (NEL) were reunited for the first time in too long and I got chance to spend some time with my fantastic mum and dad. They are doing well and my mum is putting up a Stirling fight against her cancer. Dad is right along side her and helping her every step of the way, when he is not tripping over dishwasher doors left open by me! Apart from that though, there seemed to be a general feeling of doom and gloom about the place.

I had forgoten how bleak the British autumn could be. It seemed to be raining from the time I landed to the time I left and good news was far from the front pages. I think it was my brief trip back to Clapham though that has brought on a strange longing for the "noughties". Not usually one for nostalgia - unlike 'A' who loves it but thinks it isn't what it used to be! - I have found myself drifting back misty eyed to happy times and wondering where it all went?

Has anyone seen the noughties? Has anyone else lost them? I have spent the morning looking for them but can't find them anywhere! We are just a few short weeks from a new decade and this one seems to have passed by while I was busy doing something else.

I know having thought about it at length this morning that I have crammed a lot in, but still refuse to believe it was actually 10 years long. In that time I got married;had two children;travelled 40000km around India;lived in a foreign country;lived in eight properties;had four jobs;visited 11 countries;had seven friends, two uncles and a grandma all die yet it seems to have gone in the blink of an eye! Nearly 15% of my three score and ten gone, consigned to history,the annals of time never to be returned.

Surely it can't be more than 3 years since we all sat around waiting for planes to drop out of the sky and computers' the world over to crash, causing catastrophe on a global scale? No more than 3 years since we were deciding whether to pay out huge sums for a ticket to a super-club, or "getting away from it all with a few friends to a cottage in Norfolk/Devon/Cornwall"(delete as applicable)? No more than 3 years since we really did "PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999"!? I won't accept it has gone, I feel cheated and want it back now. If anyone finds it please hand it in to the local police station.

The Noughties were always going to be fantastic. All us thirty-somethings now, who were late twenty's then and in our prime knew it was going to be a great time in our lives. Something special was in the air, our J.F.K.(Tony) was in power, Oasis were number one and everything seemed possible. Here on the cusp of the next decade that same air has rotted, our Nixon (Brown) is in power,Bob the builder is number one and that "anything is possible" feeling seems to have been replaced with dread!

I didn't feel any remorse - apart from missing family - on my departure back to Delhi. I really feel that this decade is going to be even better than the last despite the massive debt the Government has saddled us with and despite the fact there seems to be little optimism about.

It is so much healthier to look forward to the amazing times ahead than the amazing times behind. I don't know what the "teenies" will have in store for us but I know they will be great. While I am with 'A' and the boy's they always are, so if you do find the "noughties" down the back of the settee, or in the gap between the driving seat and the hand-brake in the car, just leave them there. I don't actually want them back, I am marching on to the best ten years of my life!