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These are bad times, quite literally. A rather strange occurrence is marking the fin de siecle.

 Not as the doomsayers predicted, with meteor showers raining down, or a little local difficulty at a place called Armageddon.

 A large section of mankind is in the grip of a mind-boggling phenomena.

 A remarkable amount of well-educated people, whose utterances would normally be taken with due gravitas, have undergone a befuddlement normally experienced by children of a certain age.

 They cannot tell the time, or chose not to.

 Not the small time you carry on your wrist, or the time your favourite programme comes on the television. Nor the time of day.

 This is the big time - time that does not get any bigger. This is millennium time.

 The inability cuts right across class and social divides. The millennium bug is not confined to machines, humans have caught the virus.

 Besides bug-infested computers do not know any better and far-flung destinations near the international dateline who nobody would ever really want to visit to watch the sun rise on any other day of the millennium can be expected to cash in.

 Well and good, but vast swathes of mankind are behaving with characteristics usually associated with woolly creatures.

 Billions of dollars are being spent marking something that is not happening.

 In London they are building a massive tiddlywink and calling it the Millennium Dome, an untimely symbol in the heartland of good timekeeping, Greenwich.

 Shout it from the rooftops on Tsuen Mun and Sai Kung, from the balconies of Mid-Levels and Quarry Bay, the millennium does not start in 2000, it starts exactly one year later.

 People who would normally know what they were talking about are discussing the approaching new millennium casually en passant.

 When asked what century we live in they find no sense of contradiction in replying the 20th but they clearly have no idea when the 20th century ends and no grasp of what century they will be living in next year.

 You can excuse someone being five minutes late, even mixing up their days, but being out of kilter by as much as a millennium is difficult to countenance. Working out when the millennium starts does not require the mental contortions of an astro-physicist and you will not get vertigo from scaling this mathematical foothill.

 In the 20th century, at least one year of that century should have those two digits, 20, in the front. Our century owes its adjective to its last year, hence the new millennium commences on 2001.

 But it is not the only marking of time. It's 5760 in Judaism and 1431 in Islam. And if millennia are gauged from the birth of Christ we are already in the third.

 King Herod's decree to put all male infants under two to the sword (issued because of Christ's birth) was announced more than 2,000 years ago.

  It is a good bet that the third millennium started in 1997, about the time of the handover.

 Whisper it softly, too many of us are behind the times.



Millennium celebrations out of kilter