NOSTALGIA FOR AN AGE THAT NEVER EXISTED : 01 JAN 2002

Looking back is a dangerous thing. The natural human desire is to be optimistic. As detail fades in time, and the past becomes a series of broad brush strokes, it is only natural to paint the past in the simplest colours and the grandest gestures. People all over the world try to romanticise the way things used to be. Things were always, always simpler in the past. Life was less complicated, there was less going on. Life was slower.

Nostalgias not what it used to be.

An endless stream of "I Love 1971" programmes (even those which romanticised the dim and distant past of 1999) have done nothing but airbrush the past into a sepia-tinged, glorious playground. Let us not let our memories cloud what the past was like. The trains never ran on time. Things always cost too much. Bands split up before you got to see them play in your locality. Kids used to stand on street corners and smoke and swear. You used to be one of them. All of us have shagged people we didn't like - and not just in the decades past. Some of us might be doing it now.

For me, life is always in a state of perpetual improvement. With every joy and every tragedy, we learn something about what it is to be a human being - and how to make the world a better place.

It is now the first, hopeful day of 2002. Three years ago I was watching "The Great Dictator" by Charlie Chaplin at my dad's house, in a tiny bedroom, having not slept at all, and having seen New Order and Underworld in London. I remember driving back up the motorway in broad daylight at 7am feeling like shit.

I can remember two years ago I was sleeping in a haunted house with a girl I was living with. She left me six weeks later, and went to her parents, so that I was living in a freezing two-bedroomed flat in the most-socially deprived area of the already destitute hick town of Walsall.

A year ago, I remember waking up in "a studio flat" in Central London - a room stuffed full of my posessions that was completely self-contained, cramped as hell, and starting in a new job. I felt like I had somehow had to start again, and give up everything in my past; my town, my friends, my everything - to start again. For me, New Years Day 2001 was about as far removed from the world of silver suits and space travel as you could get. I was cooking on a two stove Baby Belling hob in a rented room. And I was typing up a compilation of bad poetry in an attempt to purge myself of the ghosts of Christmas Past and draw a line underneath a past life.

A lot can change in a very short period of time. In the course of the last year I played some concerts with my band - something I can't really have imagined possible - that people would pay money and see me and my friends perform songs we wrote togther in our bedrooms. I started work on several novels - most of which are in varying states of completion. Some will be abandoned before they get anywhere. Some will no doubt be slowly polished off over the course of the next few years.

I moved house twice in 2001. The only thing that is a constant is your name. And even then, not always. I got married this year. People I now see on a daily basis I hadn't even met twelve months ago.

The world was a very different place twelve months ago. The spoilt angry child that is the American political system could not have imagined that two passenger planes would be hijacked and flown into two of the biggest buildings in the world. Or that New York's World Trade Centres would collapse like a deck of cards on national television. Or that the Accidental President - the one who incidentally got less votes than the loser (Isn't Democracy wonderful?) - would show himself up for the idiot that is with words and actions I haven't heard since I left school.

The truth is that we all knew America was the child bully in the international playground. It ruthlessly used its power to ensure that capitalism prevailed. And if it didn't get its way it threatened to call in its Dad - the international coalition of similar states such as the UK, France, etc. - to beat you up and blow you to smithereens. Just like the Taliban Jihad that could bring about the destruction of civilisation if mankind is as violent as it is immature.

This is not to say that anyone with any moral framework whatsoever should agree with any form of terrorism, be it inflicted by global superpowers, corporations, or demented religious warriors who belive that Allah is so great that all his female creations must be masked. All it is to say is that the arrogance of all of mankind's leaders will eventually be our undoing.

As I type I'm watching "Superman" on DVD. In the background of "Metropolis" two enormous towers stand in the night sky. They will never be photographed again. I will never see them in the flesh. Thousands of people will never see their parents, their friends, their lovers, in the flesh either. It has not been a good year, 2001. But it has been a learning experience. Let us hope that we - mankind as a whole - do not make the mistakes that others have made before today.

1st January 2002