The mainstream changed to accommodate us. It really did feel like we’d won. A Labour government got in, for the first time since the 70s. Bars started opening until 2 a.m., and some, all night. Working-class people were celebrated, allowed to be exceptional. Extraordinary ordinary people had become our heroes, and, after they moved aside, Big Brother started and reality TV became the way to make everyday amazingness into stars.
The other day, I came across a piece I’d written for The Face in 1996. It was called ‘Where Were You When the 90s Happened?’. It made me laugh when I saw it. It’s so hard to assess an era or a state of mind when you’re in the middle of it. It redefines itself from a distance, over the years.
The important thing about the 90s was that I was in my twenties, I suppose. We were good at being young. Our belief in change was the same belief that all young people have, but we were lucky. Our generation had the circumstances, the impetus, the gold-plated opportunity to be able to push our beliefs out into the world. Many of our ideas are still around.
At the end of the 90s, I’d moved flat ten times, got through four cars, two serious love affairs and a few not-so-serious. I’d gone away a lot, for work (Las Vegas, LA, New York) and for me, because I’d needed to open up my head. I’d been to Cuba, to Mexico, to Iceland, to the Scottish islands, to Australia, to Nova Scotia, all around Europe. I’d done a bit of telly presenting (I never saw the shows because I was always out), I’d interviewed a lot of musicians, I’d written umpteen features on going out and staying up, on trainers and driving. I’d danced all night, then carried on to the next night, over and over. I’d written a book, about suburbia. In the summer of 1999, on a tour designed to take books into nightclubs, prove that the chemical generation liked to read, I’d met S, who I’m now married to.
So much change, so much energy. I know it was me, but it feels like it wasn’t. And, God, it sounds exhausting.
We left the 90s behind and continued in much the same way as before. (When are you meant to stop? Is there a signal? How do you know?) On New Year’s Eve 1999, we met up at a friend’s flat and then rushed to the South Bank to goggle at the fireworks, high on the crowd – excitable, international, cuddly – as well as the exploding sky.
Afterwards, in the early hours of the new millennium, a group of us bunched across a packed bridge, straggled through closed-to-traffic tunnels to get to a club. We were blitzed, so it took us quite a while; anyone watching might have been reminded of Monty Python’s 100-yard race for people with no sense of direction. One or two of us freaked out on the way – everyone held hands and ran until it was better, like 5-year-olds in the park. And then we were there.
I don’t know how long we lasted, but long enough for the evening to splinter, to turn into individual adventures that you recounted later when you bumped into each other at the horse-trough washbasins, when you fell on your friends as though you’d been parted for years, rather than hours. Were we playing hide and seek at one point? Did we kick our legs out from behind pillars, like stupid pole-dancing ponies? As the sun rose, S and I went to an after-party in a bar off Leather Lane. It had a spiral staircase and a minor film star was there. We slumped on squishy sofas, teased the film star, made each other laugh.
We took photos of ourselves on our digital camera when we got home, thinking we were beautiful, but we looked sweaty and mad. Not that it mattered. We dragged the duvets to the sofa and watched nature films all day.
A few days later, I turned 33. And gradually, gradually, things began to change. Friends were finding partners, leaving house-shares, settling into new places with each other. Or they were leaving the country, resettling in a different way. We were still going out: just up the road, to Basement Jaxx’s Rooty in the George IV, or miles away, to Glastonbury, or Ibiza. We got excited about bands. The Strokes: I remember seeing them at Heaven, gorgeous cartoons, rock-star Muppets. The Libertines, not so much. UK garage gradually warped into what would become grime, which I really liked, but I danced to it in my kitchen or at festivals, not at clubs.
The money I got from writing the book on suburbia meant that I could put a deposit on a flat, so I did, and moved in with two flatmates. We tiptoed around the new place, marvelling at how grown-up it seemed: the previous owners were a family, and everything was painted and maintained. The rented flat we were leaving was not so pretty. There, the walls were beige anaglypta, fingerprinted, smudged. The kitchen was orange with grease. In the bathroom, part of the ceiling had collapsed and was held up by the shower rail. When you went to the toilet in there, you had to wear a cycle helmet, in case the whole thing came down completely (health and safety). The new flat had Victorian fireplaces, sash windows, stripped wooden doors with china handles, and it seemed astonishing, solid and artily bohemian, an entry point to a proper life.
And so it proved. After a few months in our new palace, one friend moved out; then S moved in; then, a year or so later, the other friend left. Now there’s no more moving: we still live in the same flat, S and I and our kids.
There were weddings, on and off over the decade. There were kids, too, to join the children a few people already had. A range of ages of parents and offspring, but a sudden rush of births after I was 36. We left everything to the final deadline, squeezed in adulthood as late as we could.
Time was doing what it does, ticking on, disappearing, bit by bit by bit. Opportunities were opening up as others were shutting down. There are people who are good at knowing when to move on, the best time to leave, the new thing to follow, where to go and when. They seem born with excellent timing. They’d somehow bought two-bedroom flats while they were in their early twenties. They were busy setting up companies, or were selling the ones they’d already established (when? how?). They were ‘moving into digital’.
But there are those of us who make decisions too quickly, or too slowly, or who don’t even realize there are decisions to be made. We continue with what we’re doing because it’s what we do, or because we like it, or we’re loyal to something that perhaps is long gone. Or we sack it all on a whim, move from job to job, changing but not progressing, trying out new versions of the same thing.
I’d been working for the Observer since the mid-90s, as a regular writer, but I was still a freelancer. This suited me, though I wasn’t always good at it. I said yes to jobs I was awful at, turned down opportunities that seem life-changing now. And when I got a new job, I couldn’t work out, always, how I was meant to behave, what I was supposed to be doing. I needed an editor, a producer; a mentor, maybe. I wasn’t concentrating. I landed another book deal, for a biography, but I couldn’t deliver. I wrote dramas that didn’t work out. I helped with online start-ups, I mentored teenagers who wanted to be journalists. I wrote columns and my columns were okay. But other columnists came along and they were sharper, funnier or more surreal: they were better.
S and I had met in 1999, and we gave each other an excuse to carry on going out, to continue with what we‘d been doing separately (we’d been going to the same places, sometimes even the same parties, we’d discovered) but now with each other. We extended our work trips and went to Thailand, to China and New Zealand. We found the cheapest flights we could to Trieste, Amsterdam, Cornwall, the Pyrenees.
I’m not so good at remembering what happened when we went away, what we saw. S tells me tales of our trips and it’s as though I never went. I remember the feelings, though.
‘God, do you remember how much we used to argue?’ I say to S. ‘How could we be arsed?’
Our relationship wasn’t smooth. It was difficult in the early years: we were both used to doing what we liked; our backgrounds were different; we found it hard to compromise into partnership. But we were cheap to run, we loved each other. Lucky us. Some of our friends had hooked up with the wrong person. Years of their time had been invested in a partner who suddenly didn’t want to stay around, or who was already