Only 485 days to go until the Millennium. It's bad enough when the nation starts counting down to Christmas, but we're now expected to get all fired up about an event more than a year away.

Fair enough - there's the usual New Year's Eve party to look forward to and doubtless it will be bigger and more noisy than ever before.

But why are we celebrating? What's there to rave about when our lives are going to be turned upside down, when we will no longer be able to go about our daily business either in the home or at work, when we are all about to become victims of the much-publicised Millennium bug?

Now I'm no Einstein, but I'd say I was a reasonably intelligent person, yet I just cannot grasp why the country will grind to a halt simply because the date involves an extra two zeros. First it was computer software. Then it was telecommunications systems and burglar alarms. Now it's washing machines, dishwashers and microwave ovens.

Next will be supermarket checkouts, petrol pumps and cash dispensers. We'll all start the New Year broke and hungry. But, seriously, what's there to celebrate when, from the sound of things, our lives will fall apart?

It may all be scaremongering, but by my reckoning, it will take a brave man to use a toaster after midnight on December 31, 1999. And whatever you do, don't have an accident - hospital equipment is also at risk of going haywire.

Of course, it might all be pie in the sky. I mean, it didn't happen in the year 1000. Or did it?

The Anglo-Saxons may have whooped it up on a huge scale 1,000 years ago knocking back goblets of ale, scoffing wild boar and singing bawdy songs outside the Burnt Cakes Theme Pub, only to wake up with a hangover to find their 24-hour cooking fires - set using Ye Olde Oak with Birch inlay Cooking Timer bought from the Viking Better-Buy merchant Ikea - had inexplicably gone out.

They might have been frustrated to find their Habit-Tat water divining sticks madly whirling and twirling, their designer chain mails from the up-market fashion house Sax-On rusting, their writing quills mysteriously blunted and the furnace in their foundry going into meltdown.

And, poor loves, on top of this they had to endure invasions by Vikings, rape, pillage, looting and numerous other unsavoury social problems.

Don't believe me? Well, Ethelred, the Saxon King of the time, was nicknamed Ethelred The Unready. Was this because he was ill-prepared for the Millennium Bug?

Still, all is not lost. If Bug 2000 really does cause everything with an electrical plug to crash, it won't be the end of the world. On the contrary, it will do us all good to live the simple life for a while. Better sign up for an allotment before the rush.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.