I am writing this at the end of a bleak, damp November, with January still a long way away and the millennial buzz still going strong. There's a fair bit of future-gazing going on and some of the tabloids are filling space the easy way, speculating what the millennial world will look like. I shall be very surprised if G.K. Chesterton is proved wrong: he predicted that the future will look very similar to the present. It would be nice if it did not. The 20th century is sliding to a bloody end, with a disturbing similarity in the headlines of today and those of the first decade of the century. But the odds are that three noughts at the end of the calendar will not make us happier people.