h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I got married, had a baby, then got divorced. That was pretty much it.
Other stuff:
I didn't believe Diana had died - I thought my husband was on a wind up when he told me. Rik Mayall had an accident on a quad bike and hurt his head - he was quite ill for a while.

**tries to pull together the Diana-Mayall-Osborne conspiracy theory**

B

It's all I could think of on the spur of the moment.

My brother woke me up at 8am to tell me Diana had died. I told him to p*ss off, I was trying to sleep.

Affected me deeply, it did.

B

The day after Diana died, I was fortuitously booked to go on holiday to a Canary island (I forget which). "Good", I naively thought, "at least I'll be away from all the endless tributes and all that cr@p".

Some hope!

RF

I heard when I got up at 3pm (I'd been working the night before!) I was probably still up when the news broke, but I prefer the sounds of Dollar at 3am.

I didn't discover until the day after
I'd been out partying that weekend, came home on the Sunday and switched on Channel 4 (the only channel not to interupt normal programming) so I didn't know until the Monday morning, lucky me

It is too soon,but the dreamlike mistiness of the 90th already vies with other decades in our hall of history.
This was the era when the fictitious threat of terrorism has not yet been so elaboratly fought against and hijacked by various political creeds jostling for suprimacy,people were free to travel by air without calamities of morbid imagination, I myself personally carried in my jacket, packets of 20 explosive propulsion engines for Estes amateur rockets on the flight from Madrid to Moscow (those contained gunpowder enough to set the whole jet on fire (about 500 grams of it), and never for a moment had a thought that I am doing anything illigal, this year even a child's bow with arrows of suction-cup tips was a cause of a grave suspicion.

This was the decade too,when Russia got a transient breather of freedom,that started with the hour - long queues to shops , everyone to a man had to suffer to purchase the weekly ration of barley and butter and no milk; with vanqushed tyrany, univeral distitution and high hopes- For few brief months it was possible to roam the sanctum sanctorum of the Soviet fame, as was vividly illustrated by the headlines -in the Times magazine of August 19th 1990.- "Welcome to KGB",with front page sporting the slick close-up of Mr. Kruchkov, last KGB chief,smiling couragesly at his deck.- I still display this front cover, now faded the rest of the magazine gone, as a pin-up in my country-house room. Exactly a year later, people -now barbarians reduced to the pitiable state by lack of food and sheer inadequacy of social services, were at the gate, and the evil empire collapsed.

Now the era of drastic change has been ushered in and it was every man for himself - and all the roads were open in proportion to man's shrewdness and sagacity- the whole land was there to be pillaged and those who held it dear also consented to it: For many it was the occasion of great jubilation to be issued with rose-coloured privatisation bearer cheques,their face value being such as allowed them the purchase of a car. Insignificant proportion of people bought not only cars on them but chunks of national industry inconcievable tracts of wealth. Majority of the country-men either invested them in fraudulent mutual funds, or exchanged them with black marketeers ( rubbing shoulders alongside poor and needy cadgers ,in underground metro stations, as it were in Moscow) for 6000 roubles two years later- Money barely enough at that time to buy 2 bottles of vodka.
Only a nation of uneducated barbarians could have allowed itself to suffer thus at their own hands. In a sense the land itself had reverted to savagery. The threat of hunger though receding,life was brutish and nasty at that time around 1993, especially in October, when another oppressive and calamitous upheaval this time the mortar shelling of the White House , the seat of Russian government,was taking place. Ill-starred October,and the preceding month of September, chanced to be oustandingly cold that year,and preparations for the heating season in Moscow were long overdue: when the aforementioned events were coming to pass , numerous hospital wards, with inside temperature in many of them close to the freezing point, were over-full wiht victims of those events,and TV-news were full of invocations and pleadings to charitable to bring bandages and food , if they had any at home, to hospitals in their locality.

I place the watershed in the neigbourhood of the spring next year 1994, the year of momentous events in South Africa and gruesome genocide in Rwanda. It was the feast for eyes to behold food kiosks springing now here and there. And palates of many were now rewarded with the taste of long -forgotten cakes, chocolate,fruits and juice. That brought a renewed vigour of life with itself. True: prices were ballooning with every passing day, taxes were exorbitantly high. But along with it came the cheerfull fruits of avidly awaited freedom: money could have been made by suitcases in every avenue of emerging market economy,iron gate was no longer allowing people to see sights and breathe in the gulps of civilized world , taxes were slighted , (not so the rents of protection racketeers), and the tale of two Russias ,- one glittering with the newly-installed glamour of Tverskuaya St. with its face turned to the West, and the other eloquent with abject poverty and unceasing want - was beginning to emerge.
This second much-concealed face is more real than the first. With the heady decade dissolving in the mist of memory and its hopes for many turning into hangover. New daughty leadership of the country,that by happenstance or irony has been propelled into power on the very eve of the millenium - 31th December 1999 being the exact date, - cleverly and inexorably exploits this second face of the Janus-figure of Russia, thence drawing its unlimited fund of goodwill and enjoying the unbounded support. Many good and unexampled things can be wrought (and had been!) by the govenment of good faith supervised by the man of the people,but there is a vast and growing potential to transform the fair blossoms of liberty so hardly won and attained into bitter fruits of usurpatious deceit and hidden malice of dictatorial dominion. The boundary is not crossed yet, and the foul deed is not irrevocably accomplished.
When we drive the car to prosperity we are always prone to bring it to its creaking unsafe and dangerous limit of speed, only so can the race for the better future be won. But if the things go wrong and the vehicle spins out of control , the consequences can be truly horrendous.
The story of Russia in 90th is a good footnote to the history of the world in the closing decade of its second millenium. Now and them peoples of the world, whole nations as one, fall victims to the pandemics of universal and alien "mind parasites" attacking this world (apparently from outside). In 19th century (and for the most part of the 20th century)it was the apparent dissederatum of the Communist way of living- millions enthusiastically shared in the benefits of this idea, and so allowed nifty dealers the world over to hijack it and enrich themselves,leaving those sincerely beliving duped. In 90th it was the Liberal Creed that came to ascendancy in the world sucking its God-given riches through evil operations of "mind parasites", nourishing itself on dissilusion.Its current variation is called "the fight against the terrorism",allowing us to see the shape of things to come: more sabre-rattling and oppression in the name of ridding the world from illusory enemy.
This mystirious desease encroaches upon minds exploiting the potential of human beings to stick tags on occurances of the world: Tag is much more lucid and clear than a phenomena it denotes. One can live years with his tags for sacred cows only to find them thread-bare in the end. In the end I am a stauch suporter of the struggle against the terrorism, but when I analyse my notions of it I find that by affirming the cause I only discover new chains on me and play to the hands of insolent and agile.
Secondly the aforementioned decease is not unlike the alchocolic dependence. One feels high jinks in him and exalts his life and gracious wholesomeness of the feeling in him invoked by drinking , to end in tears and disillusion. So is the current Liberal strain of "mind parasites". 90th were the period of elation, today we commence to observe the optimistic, slow and all-encompassing slant towards the incarceration of our natural liberty in the shackles of tyrany once again. It is imposed on us not against our wish and will , but with our own accord and consent thereunto.
And the cure? Infection lies in main-stream TV-news and tabloid papers. One should run for his life if any of the incediary language therein contained wanders into his mind. The language is good and inspiring. It is even harmless if one avoids rare and apparent landmines of tags, that,if believed, burst and sent forth the shrapnel of "mind parasites" that wounds and degrades our spirits.

when i think of the 90s i think of the Spice Girls. Sad I know

I have been busy again trying to crystalise the image of the fin de siecle decade again. The Economist Survey celebrating the century( can be obtained for free on www.economist.com Section: Surveys , subsection: Others),published precientiosly September 11th 1999,came in handy in this respect. Infused with the aroma of fruitfull optimism ,as it were,it did not bypass the mention of the basic principle of human sobriety in life,worded by Churchill: "the further backwards you look ,the further forwards you can see".
Let it be said that people live in here and now. Basic human heuristic of perception -the anchoring effect- is rooted in it, for we are prone sincerely to believe that weeks are year-long.
The decade was on balance the finest-hour , and so it was just as fleeting. One helpfull analogy-exemplified by market behaviour- is pertinent here: When market is gripped by the access of optimism it brings out miracles that ride the waves,and confines dissilusions to troughs. Yet there invaribly comes the day of recogning, when evils swept under carpet resurface with all their potency grown strong on ignoring. Atrabulious period of rancour and fighting ensues and takes precedence in human affairs. Yet even this period is put in parenthesis. And the new wave of development begins anew.
So,decades are not interrelated in a zero-sum way. They,hopefully,do not represent meaningless aberations around the acceptable mean of social state of affairs, and so flow one into another in an upward if not linear way.
What will the world look like two hundred years from now? If we extrapolate the trends in growing affluence as they were seen 10 years ago, we will end up thinking that unlimited riches can be created out of limited resources, and even thousand years from now every tomorrow will be brigter then the last.
Such a view is just as unpardonable as the idea of zero-sum progress. Yet one is confronted to chose either of them.
It is only around the time of the emergence of capitalism that people came to think of the time in the linear way. Never before such an idea was concievable for all, for many were thinking of it as evolving in circles.
Extraterrestrial beings , were they to visit the Northern Hemisphere in May , would be tempted to think that warmer weather will forever persist. It is only from the recollections of others that they will learn about lean times.
To follow the wisdom of this logic and to employ Churchill's view ,one is prompted to look 500 years back at least and establish that extended production is not for keeps.
One day we might well come to think of 90th as the heyday of the year.

For me, the 90s means being a baby, slowly becoming cognizant, and one Halloween, seeing every single person in the entire school district wearing that Scream costume. That trend is going on to this day. Every Halloween you see three witches, two Pillsbury Doughboys, a smattering of really nice and original costumes, and over 400 Scream costumes, all with varying amounts of fake blood smeared on the mask.