It’s some ungodly time in the early hours of January 1, 2010, and with the sound of fireworks still ringing in your ears you’ve managed to stumble home.
You unlock the door to your soon-to-be-painfully-trendy Hackney flat, pushing aside a stack of mail - unopened mobile phone bills and bank statements among it. As you climb into bed, a load of magazines cascade onto the floor - Vice, the latest The Stool Pigeon, a paid copy of the NME.
You’re on the brink of 10 years that’ll change the shape of society, but it does’t quite feel that way just yet. There are more urgent things to attend to, like drinking a pint of water and immediately falling asleep fully clothed. 8am, January 1, 2010It starts how any morning-after-the-night-before starts, with a text that reads only “OMG have you been on fb xxx”. You haven’t - it’s 8am – but you know what awaits you.
Logging onto your white MacBook, you find yourself tagged in no less than 70 low-res images, taken just hours ago, with six of your friends in a nightclub bathroom.
Each one meticulously tagged, the flash from a very small digital camera flaring against the dirty glass of the mirror.
Some of your more technologically savvy friends go to the effort of uploading their pictures to a website that’ll highlight you entirely in neon, or maybe sepia for a vintage effect.
You’re all doing the same pose (hand on hip, side on, slight bend in the knee), and by picture three there’s really nothing to add, but that doesn’t stop you liking and commenting on almost every single one.
In the meantime, you’ve got three pokes to deal with, and someone has sent you an extremely urgent FarmVille request (the health of their virtual crop depends on it), so you’re going to be here for a while. 10amThere were a few run-ins with the broadband connection, but you had a good look at every one of those photo albums eventually. It’s probably time to get dressed, and luckily, you know exactly what you’re going for.
Skinny jeans have been knocking around for a while now, and everyone from your door neighbour to your nan has been asking how on earth you’re breathing in those things. No, mum, I didn’t sew myself into them, and yes having them in every colour from salmon pink to a sophisticated turquoise is actually very cool.
The joke is on them all now though, isn’t it, because someone – it’s really not clear who – actually combined skin-tight denim (quite uncomfortable, to be fair, especially combined with a low-rise waistband) and everyone’s totally legitimate trouser-of-choice, black leggings*.
Jeggings. Preferably dark blue, preferably with light brown “stitching” that was quite clearly printed on by machine, always, always sagging around the knee. Not a functioning pocket in sight.
Open your drawer, and drag out exactly the same floral, tight, three-quarter-sleeve, scoop-neck top that every single person you know also owns. Like this entire ensemble, it’s both classy and comfy, and there’s absolutely nothing not to like.
It if gets a bit chilly – it is January after all – you’ve always got the longline cardigan made of an incredibly thin, stretchy, 100% unnatural material (no buttons, just weirdly deep pockets) to cover up. If you were a man, you’d be using that ridiculously long piece of facial hair you’ve been styling for a year to keep your neck warm.
It’s a lazy day, but what’s an outfit without accessories? Pearl (ahem) earrings straight from the Primark multipack and oversized glasses (there’s absolutely nothing wrong with your eyesight, the lenses are plastic) ON, and you’re set.
Let’s face it, you’re probably not getting out the front door anytime soon – but you’ve got your trusty Uggs, somehow worn through on both the instep and outstep, ready to go.
*Yes, they ARE trousers thank you very much. 12pmIt’s all blowing up on
Facebook chat. You took your
iPhone 3 out with you last night, so where are the pictures?
Although it came out in 2008, and the more advanced 3GS was already in circulation, you’re a graduate not a millionaire, so the iPhone 3 and its 2 mega-pixel camera is what you’ve got to work with.
They might be blurry and pixellated, but they certainly won’t be going to waste – you didn’t spend all that time perfecting that side parting/backcomb for nothing! Get comfortable, we’re about to embark on a mass upload.
It is not a quick process, but watching that little blue bar slide along with each upload and waiting for the likes and comments to come flooding in is quite enough excitement.
It’s not like there’s much else to do –
Twitter is still relatively niche, and
Instagram hasn’t even been invented yet. You’ve got Angry Birds though, and that’s enough for now. 2pmIt’s the first of the month, and while the hangover isn’t really going anywhere, neither is the pressing need to pay the rent.
It’s London, so of course it’s not cheap – your two-bed Hackney flatshare costs a little more than £1,000 between you each month (by 2019 it’ll cost you almost double that – and let me assure you, wages won’t have doubled accordingly). At the moment, average rents in
England hover at around £156 a week, but in eight years time the average price will be £193 a week.
Despite the
UK hovering in the midst of a cold spell – the coldest winter since 1987 in fact – it’s probably time to take the plunge and head out into the freezing temperatures to get some supplies in for the evening ahead.
There’s no snow in
London on January 1, but some parts of the north east saw almost four inches of the white stuff fall – and you can never be too cautious, so hat, scarves, and gloves it is.
It’s a brand new decade and a fresh start for all – but apparently not for inflation which is still stubbornly elevating the cost of the basics – £1.23 per loaf of white bread (despite a brief surge to £1.32 in 2013, a loaf is actually cheaper - £1.01 - in November 2019), and £0.44 for a pint of milk (unchanged in November 2019).
Despite the daylight robbery of their new 17p price tag (up from 10p), you grab a couple of Freddos for the road too. Not to panic you, but by 2019 they’ll cost a whole 25p (and that’s down 5p from their 30p peak in 2017).
It’s a flying visit, so you shove it all in your free carrier bag (you’re aware that at the side of basically every motorway there are full hedges with more plastic than leaves trapped in them, but Blue Planet is a long way off yet), and make for safety. 4pmWhile you were at home over
Christmas you picked up some post, and now the festive buzz is behind you it’s probably best to face reality.
The first is from the student loans company, and it’s honestly quite hard to even take a quick glance at the huge debt you managed to get yourself into.
Starting in 2006, you had the misfortune of being the first year ever to pay £3,000 a year rather than £1,000, and you’re pretty bitter about that.
How those six contact hours a week ever cost a total of THREE-THOUSAND-POUNDS?
The thought of all that money going down drain is actually pretty painful, so you put on a
music channel to listen to the charts show as a welcome bit of background noise.
The programme flicks through all the hits: Cry Me Out (Pixie Lott), Bad Boys (Alexandra Burke), I Gotta Feeling (Black Eyed Peas), Whatcha Say (Jason Derulo), Tik Tok (Kesha),
Russian Roulette (Rihanna), and Bad Romance (Lady Gaga).
Beating them all, at the very pinnacle of the charts, is a cover of The Climb as performed by recent XFactor champion Joe McElderry. 6pm A steady stream of (mostly fake) news hasn’t quite infiltrated the feeds of Facebook quite yet, so beyond the relationship statuses of everyone you went to secondary school with, you’re not exactly up-to-date with current affairs.
It’s probably time to have a scroll through the headlines of the day (or maybe just sit back and watch the six o’clock news unfold in front of you) but with half the country hungover it’s not been a huge day.
Amongst the headlines is a story about thieves stealing £100,000 worth of jewellery from a car at a McDonald’s drive-thru, prime minister Gordon Brown is considering bringing in full-body scanners at airports, and – of course – the big freeze.
There’s not much politics about, but
Boris Johnson continues to be the mayor of London, and David Cameron (while he might not know it yet) is just months away from becoming the new Conservative prime minister in coalition with the Lib Dems, whose leader is also just months away from becoming the centre of a certain brand of ‘Cleggmania’.
Yes, really. You’ve seen him on TV a few times and think to yourself that he’d probably be okay in government, actually. 8pmWell, you’re on the sofa now and it really doesn’t feel as though there’s much point moving, so time to keep up to date with the never-ending twists and turns in Albert Square.
You’re just in time for the second half of the programme (the first was on a couple of hours before), and boy is it all going on.
You, and (at it’s viewership peak) 12.34 million other viewers are about to watch Sayeed face his wedding to Amira, confess his love for Christian, and be confronted by his mum over his sexuality. It’s a lot.
Halfway through you fancy some food, but there’s nothing in the house. We’re not quite in the land of
Uber Eats and Deliveroo just yet, and Just Eat is still pretty basic, so you do what you’ve always done and rifle through the paper Chinese menu and give them a call.
By the time your order has arrived Sayeed has married Amira, there’s been a big wedding, and – as is customary – all is not exactly well.
It’s prime time on New Year’s Day, and the classics are emerging for the very first time – Nessa is about to marry Dave on Gavin and Stacey, and history is made when we say goodbye to David Tennant as the 10th Doctor Who (and say hello to Matt Smith as the 11th).
Turning back to the regular programming, it’s almost time for the 10 o’clock news. No thanks – the past decade was pretty full on and it feels a bit soon to start worrying about the new one. Related... Every Year Of The Decade Ranked From Best To Worst How The NHS Has Changed In A Decade - In Numbers The Decade In Entertainment