How we lived then
For the past year, I’ve been writing a book about women and fame in the
noughties. It’s a compellingly strange decade to look back on. At the time, I was highly prone to paroting the utopianism of tech libertarians — the internet would make everything better, and everything it made worse would be better really, because online existence was the unavoidable future.
One of the lines I remember being routinely trotted out was that the internet was no more to be feared than the printing press — which, in retrospect, does seem a remarkably sanguine take given the fact that the printing press ushered in about two centuries of religious turmoil, war in Europe, witch trials and heretic burnings. Still, I guess information wants to be free and all that.
In comparison, a decade or so of rampant sex tapes, revenge porn and public shaming seems like mild stuff. And already a lot of the hectic cruelty that characterised the noughties has receded into incomprehensibility. The hardest part isn’t reconstructing the way people thought in that time: it’s remembering that I was part of it all, hungrily reading the gossip blogs that now look so monstrous to me.
One thing that seems to come back easily, though, is
noughties style. Stealthily, I’ve absorbed the blonder, bronzer look of the women I’ve been writing about. With every hair appointment, my highlights have got lighter. Self-tan has reappeared on my bathroom shelf. Surely, it’s only a matter of time before I’m booking myself in for a “tramp stamp”, the tattoo at the base of the spine that was the trademark of the decade. (Nobody tell Theodore Dalrymple, who has made his opinion on ink abundantly clear in these pages.)
I’ve even rebought the perfume I wore when I was 18 — although smelling it made me wonder how much my senses have sharpened since the smoking ban. A noughties night
out used to involve passively sucking down the equivalent of 20 B&H, so even if the rest of me has aged appallingly since then, at least I have the nose of a milk-fed infant again.
I draw the line, though, at hipster waistlines, despite fashion influencers insisting that they’re on the way back. I spent my twenties contending with trousers cut so low my knicker elastic was a subject of ongoing public interest. To some things, we must say never again.