The Noughties will soon be gone!

Saying farewell to a cherished decade

By Jack Stringer

This week, as I looked at my calendar, it suddenly made me think about how precious little time we have left of our beloved decade meaning the decadence of the Noughties will be confined to the scrapbooks of history and our diminishing booze-soaked memories of these years. In less than forty days, we’ll be ushering in another new decade, and the 2010s will be all the rage. Where did the time go?

And as I was reading an article of the 100 best films of the 2000s, it got me reminiscing these ten years since we celebrated the dawn of an amazing new Millennium, back in December 1999. I remember it like it was yesterday, and it’s one of those moments that our grandkids will ask us incessant questions about what we remember. Like all its predecessors, the Noughties will be scrutinised for the defining events, the eminent figures, the dufus politicians, the diverse new technological and musical trends, and of course, ubiquitous noughties fashion, which I can’t quite sum up in one sentence.
  The world has changed

irrevocably in the past ten years, and we won’t ever forget where we were at those moments when we thought the world had changed forever. What will historians of the future come to think of Obama’s early years of his administration, of the fat-cat bankers belching out their own bonuses whilst humble workers got the short straw and of our misguided decisions to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan?
 These are the questions we will ask as we approach a new frontier of ....decadeness.
Have we changed since 1999? Back then, it was a time before both Wikipedia and Facebook, there were no iPhones or bloomin? BlackBerry?s and you could still buy a 99 cone for 99p (those were the days!). People were certainly less worried about security and health and safety, and people had more time for religion and they say that this decade has been all about introspection and nostalgia for another age, so it’s no wonder we’re all massive fans of vintage shops and I can sense that we’re still secretly yearning for the nineties. Even though the Noughties may have been a time of hasty decisions in some respects, they have been the formative years for us students, in which we’ve become marginally more mature and probably got through more Otley Runs than our livers ask of us. And we should thank these years for endowing us with great artists like the Arctic Monkeys, Kings of Leon, Bloc Party, Florence and the Machine, Kaiser Chiefs, Jamie T, The Klaxons, Bat for Lashes, Vampire Weekend etc etc, and also the more maligned things of the decade such as Ugg Boots, James Blunt and Bernie Madoff.
 The point is, we’ve all endured this weird, wacky and often wonderful decade, and we’ ve chosen to spend the last remaining months of it in lovely Leeds, so my advice is, be noughtie whilst you still have the chance, because it won’t last much longer.