Ten years after I was ten years younger

OPINION: Remember Y2K and how we all wanted to be 10 years younger, 10kg lighter and 10 grand better off?, writes Pat Veltkamp Smith in this week's And Another Thing.

Well it's funny that a decade after the year 2000 came in we still wish for these same things, people asked for their resolutions saying save money, lose weight, look better, fitter not fatter.

Now when you think of it, that's funny, really funny.

Because what we want now must be what we had then when we were 10 years younger, probably thinner, maybe richer but certainly that 10 years younger.

So – were we happier being thinner, richer, younger?

And if not, why wish for that trio of dreams now?

The thing is, mostly people don't remember ten years ago when, we dream, everything was so great.

For me though the Y2k scenario remains a vivid memory – people urged to store vast quantities of water, baked beans, batteries, loo paper and the like, all the accoutrements of disaster preparedness like we have had for bird flu, Hong Kong flu, Sars, swine flu, flood, fire earthquake, plague and the world's end.

Thankfully it worked out like insurance, being prepared and paid up meant we were saved from trouble.

But with all that going on 10 years back, we also had southern tourism initiatives like millennium passports and weddings at the end of one millennium and at the start of the next, sunset on the last day, sun rise on the first, quest for the first babe born, and memories of serious advice given around nine months earlier helping putative mothers be delivered of the world's first second-millennium infant, someone somewhere in a remote mountain range in Mongolia claiming that one, while in New Zealand, where we believe the first light struck first, other claimants to the fore.

We remember in gratitude for his millennium optimism Lou Harrison Smith, and remember a New Year wine and cheese of truly indigestible proportions.

That, I realised, was not me.

This year's New Year's Day was an echo of one 20 years ago, 1990, and the same hot dusty noisy scene at the Cromwell Speedway.

That was me.

We watched our pinky red Kattie car rattle, grind, speed round – breathtakingly exciting, nerve-racking, strength sustained with handmade hot dogs, smudge of tomato sauce, warm bottled water, hike through dusky skies to find the car, and home.

A happy new year, friends.

Let us make it a good one.

» Pat Veltkamp Smith was Southland Times women's editor until 1997 and is a former president of the Southland Justices of the Peace Association.

- © Fairfax NZ News