We all stood there awaiting the end of the world. Katy (who now lives with me) was convinced that the Millennium Bug was going to cause havoc across the globe. She was absolutely insistent that she didn't want to be in London, so we missed the fireworks (generally said to be an absolute waste of time) and stayed at a commune called Tinker's Bubble, a few rough shacks on the brow of a hill in the middle of a wood.
When midnight arrived we looked out across the lights of half a dozen small communities and they failed to be extinguished. Some fireworks did illuminate the night sky in a fairly low key way, and a very impressive factory siren filled the whole valley, but that was it. Back to reality.
The only hazard we were in the whole time was on the return journey to London. The car was shrouded in mist and try as I might, I could not find the switch to turn on the fog lamps. But we snaked back along minor roads and got home without injury.
In February I moved into the flat at 519 Lea Bridge Road and Katy moved in not long afterwards. Her instant reaction: "Yuk, how much did you say you paid for that flat?"
I spent much of February and March convinced I was about to be sacked. Usual problem. A middle manager felt I should be taking notice of him rather than running the magazine. I thought just doing a good job was enough. It wasn't enough for him. In the end there was a show down with the middle manager taking me to the bloke who runs the company I work for. There were threats but nothing much happened. I survived, though by no means unscathed. The middle manager had succeeded in pulling me down a peg or two even if he had failed to get rid of me. As a consequence I am less likely to be a threat to him in future, so he succeeded at least partly. Everyone I talk to has had the same sort of problem in their business life at some point. The only way to escape is to be too insignificant to count, or to be too important to be a target. In Japan they have a system called World Class Manufacturing which consists (among other things) of getting rid of middle managers and replacing them with a system by which teams of workers have to achieve agreed targets.
I thought once that was over I could forget about office politics and get on with my life. But it all started up again in the Autumn. This time, however, I ended up getting a huge pay increase. I can't quite figure out why and the story would be too tedious to relate, so you won't be able to tell me what I did right. Really, I struck lucky. The labour market started to tighten up, the company lost (or felt it was about to lose) some key workers. Suddenly, it became important to have people on the payroll who could do the job.
In May we went giant carrying in Steenvorde, northern France politically but really Belgium or Flanders culturally. Giant processions have been a feature of European life so long that Cromwell got the opportunity to ban them more than 300 years ago. In mainland Europe there are several big events, in Britain there are a few odd ones dotted about the place. We happened upon a giant team in Cornwall, who seemed unaware of what was going on in the rest of the world. What we did in Steenvorde was take this giant (a bit like a character out of a Brazilian carnival) and carry it around the town a couple of times. Then we enjoyed the fire birds, a pyrotechnical event. It's a very cheap way to spend an extraordinary weekend.
We went to Crete in June/ July. I can recommend Crete to anyone, just not a lot. It's a beautiful place and in the hills the people are remarkably friendly. On the coast, where most of the tourists go, it's rip off city and the Greeks clearly dislike the unwashed tourists almost as much as anyone can dislike the people who provide their bread and butter. Who can blame them? The tourists are not a very lovely lot. Basically package tours are not our thing. If we went to Crete again (which would be nice) we'd probably go off season. In July the Mediterranean suffered from a heat wave and as we flew back we saw huge, out of control forest fires in Italy. It would be a much nicer place in March or April.
In September I became a grandmother bore, as I told everyone who would listen that my grandmother (Hilda Brind) has reached the age of 104. She's profoundly deaf and very cut off from the world, but she's still here.
When we first moved into the flat at 519 Lea Bridge Road we basically lived in a corridor. It's quite a big flat but both Katy and I are hoarders. We have enormous amounts of stuff, far too precious to jettison but used very infrequently, if at all. For weeks, perhaps even months we kept on bringing more and more stuff into the place, until there was only about enough room to get from one end of the flat to the other. There wasn't actually enough room to do anything very much. We were never going to have a barn dance here but we should have been able to sit down in an armchair. But at some time the tide turned and we started to get things organised. Gradually jars of wine that used to just clutter up the place got transferred into bottles (and then got drunk). Shelves got put up everywhere. What used to be a railway terminus or airport waiting lounge turned into a home.
Lately we've torn the fitted carpet off one of the rooms and replaced it with a laminated wooden floor, painted the walls and stripped the paint off a marble fire surround. In the process we unblocked the hearth and found a beautiful Victorian fireplace. At the same time we got a cat. Charlie has FIV, the cat equivalent of HIV, so he can't be allowed out in case he gives it to all the other cats. We have a first floor flat with no garden and no possible means a cat could get out. We also had mice. Lots and lots of mice. So we needed a cat and Charlie needed a secure home. A coincidence of interests. What actually happened was that the cat almost immediately found a very unlikely way to escape, so we leafleted the block asking anyone who sees the cat to contact us. We're waiting to know if we will ever get Charlie back.
During the gale of Sunday/Monday (October 29/30, 2000) the roof was quite badly damaged and several tiles were removed. Problems started at this point when we asked the freeholder to make a claim on the insurance policy we all have to pay towards. The freeholder has been wallying about ever since. The roof leaks and all he will say is he's waiting for an insurance assessor to call. Of course, he couldn't even get access without our help but he hasn't asked for it. We sent a stamped addressed envelope asking him to send a copy of the insurance policy but he won't do it. Any advice would be very welcome at this stage.
Talking of the gale, after the first lot of flooding we kept getting emails from the States asking if we were all right. They had seen on their tvs images of widespread destruction and thought we were bound to be under nine foot of water. We had to tell them we were OK and in any case live in a first floor flat.
In 2000 I got to make a lot of new friends. Extraordinary really, considering I don't make friends easily. Katy, on the other hand seems to know everyone and makes friends wherever she goes. Perhaps something of Katy has rubbed off on me, though she wouldn't recognise it since I'm still operating at a very low level (at least compared to Katy) friendship making wise.
Katy can be exhausting if you try to keep up with her. No one could. So one learns to rest and let her get on with it. When she returns from a meeting or whatever it is she's doing, one is then in a better position to cope with the whirlwind.
I discovered C Sharp House, otherwise known as Cecil Sharp House. This is the home of folk music and dance, dedicated to the memory of the collector of so many folk songs. We went there fairly regularly to attend the International Dance Class and then in the Autumn we went to a festival of Celtic folk art in Cornwall. I can recommend attending a dance class, if you get the chance.
In November Katy and I dominated the front page of the local paper (the Leyton edition anyway). Katy had just been to America and Canada and had come back with a raccoon tailed hat (when I wear it people sing Davy Crockett etc., usually not very well). We wore that hat and another (both brought back from the other side of the Atlantic) when we went to hear the singing gynaecologist, country music performer Hank Wangford. Unfortunately the venue had a no hats policy, even on nights when they booked country music performers. As a consequence Hank was the only person in the building wearing a hat. We complained about it and ended up on the front page of the paper.
In the Autumn we discovered the local cinema, the last in the London borough of Waltham Forest, was to be sold off to a businessman called Sharma with a condition that he could only show ethnic Indian language films. He wants to set up a chain of cinemas showing Bollywood films. So we leapt into action and asked him if he'd like to have a foreign language film club showing arthouse films at his cinema. We met Sharma and he seemed fairly sympathetic. Yes, he'd like to do it and he was going to set his lawyer onto the ABC/ Odeon group (former owner of the cinema) to see if the terms could be varied to allow us to do it. We hope to have the first performance in February. The club is to be called McGuffins, since this was a plot device used by Hitchcock, who was born in nearby Leytonstone. You should be able to look at the web site at www.mcguffin.co.uk
I plan to put this message up on my web site at www.brind.uk. If you want to find out what happens to the cat (I can tell you we're pretty concerned on that subject right now), then look on the web site.