For instance, the home page of software firm Display.IT tells of its new application that lets users collect prices and financial information from the crowded information superhighway Its news page boasts a glowing series of achievements. So take your pick, stocks and shares or South Africans with an attitude problem; why not resist the lure of the laager and have another beer?congratulations to the retail prices index: you've made it through to your 50th birthday despite a traumatic life in which you've experienced a 20-fold rise in prices. A yard-of-ale contest, or a three-legged hostelry crawl? No, "500 volunteers equipped by the City of London" were enrolling at the Guildhall to fight in the Boer War - giving a whole new meaning to the concept of going liquid. So struck were the Germans by this mix of disaster and regeneration that they went through the same process all over again, twice.Finally, those people in the City who are planning a date with oblivion on New Year's Day 2000 might wonder what their predecessors were up to in 1900. So there's comfort in historical precedent for Peter Mandelson: if the Millennium Exhibition isn't ready on time, it will still be ready on time - it's the easiest bit of spin doctoring he'll ever have to do.There were no such quibbles in Germany where, as the Daily Telegraph noted alliteratively, the Kaiser had directed New Year's Eve "to be brilliantly celebrated as the close of a century which has raised the German race from the abject mire of poverty and prostration to the pinnacle of prosperity".

A cricketer does not score a century until he has completed it."Apart from providing a terrifying insight into life without TV or radio, the debate did highlight the oddity that historians began the modern calendar at 1AD not 0AD, and back in 1900 the official line was that the century was incomplete. The Evening News reported that it had been overwhelmed with correspondence on the issue, among which was a letter penned by one WG Grace: "I am of the opinion that the twentieth century begins on January 1, 1901. Despite this apparently unequal struggle between military might and hewers and drawers of water, the Boer War dragged on till 1902.And the pedantic reason? A flourishing but arcane dispute on whether 1900 represented the start of a new century or the last year of the old one. So why this surge of sobriety as 1899 turned to 1900? There's a good reason and a pedantic reason.The good reason: Britain was caught up in the Boer War - or, as the Daily Telegraph put it at the time, a conflict started by "a stubborn breed of Dutch peasants revolting against the just sovereignty of the Queen".

However, it may at least confer some perspective on the Government's spending plans for the millennium; after all, those were the glorious days of empire, and surely the Victorians knew how to throw a party.Well, as the newspapers for 1 January 1900 noted, what a swell party it was. "Thousands of people spent the last minutes of 1899 and the first of 1900 in places of worship," said the Daily Mail. "The Queen's New Year's gifts to the poor of Windsor were presented at nine o'clock this morning ... a very thick fog prevailed during the distribution of beef," gushed the Evening News, presumably implying that the diners had gone hungry because the waiters couldn't find them.And that was about it: a nice bit of smog-flavoured beef but no comfort at all to Messrs Blair and Mandelson as they try to justify spending so much on the big bash. Admittedly they only had 100 years to look back on at the end of 1899, and what with the propensity of clocks to tick rapidly and count down, that's no time at all.