Born on 1 January 1999

Back in 1999, there was this strange, jittery energy in the air, a mix of genuine excitement and that daft "Millennium Bug" paranoia where we all half-expected the toaster to explode at midnight. You couldn’t walk past a Woolworths without hearing Britney Spears or Lou Bega’s *Mambo No. 5* blaring out, and honestly, the sun felt like it never stopped shining that summer.

I remember sitting in a beer garden with a pint of Stella or a neon-blue WKD, watching the sky go dark during the total eclipse in August—everyone had those cardboard glasses on, looking like characters from a low-budget sci-fi. At home, we were all obsessed with the first series of *Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?* or huddled around the beige PC waiting ten minutes for the dial-up internet to scream its way onto the web.

Kids were swapping Pokémon cards like contraband in the playground or franticly trying to keep a Tamagotchi alive during double maths. If you went to the cinema, you were likely queuing for *The Phantom Menace* or *Notting Hill*, and dinner was probably something "sophisticated" like a Crispy Pancake or a stuffed crust pizza. It was a simpler time; we were just a bunch of people living for the weekend, completely unaware that the world was about to change forever.