Four in the morning again, guys - and another full moon. Again low over Edinburgh Castle, large and yellow, its pointy shadow cone sweeping god knows where this time. But no new day dawning now - that's gone for another year, as the darkness sweeps in faster and faster en route to our millennial mystery.

People often ask me about the present millennium - I'm sure they think I've seen it all. So much has changed in 1000 years, for some of us. Yet almost nothing for many. People bang on about progress, and the internet, and stuff - blithely unaware that three quarters of the world have yet to make a phone call. Honest. Somebody said that on the telly, so it must be true.

But almost everyone's read a book. Or a magazine. Or at least a leaflet. So we have to put the printing press as the invention of the millennium. Not the Intel chip. And definitely not Windows98.

Radio has its place too. Radio was the first time people ever heard human speech from a machine. Creepy or what? And yet my grandparents were there. Telly too, but that of course was preclipsed by the flicks. The greatest multimedia event of the millennium was when the first person took two pieces of celluloid film and glued them together, making the first ever movie. "Look - you can join the bits, and then it makes a story!" Think about it. And think where it led. And you know - that's still all it is. Joined-up bits of celluloid.

Cinema has its place, but magnificat's biggest loves are music and my language - the two greatest human constructs. So for great milleniallists I'm going to select Chaucer and Shakespeare as my Top of the Pops.

I'm quite sure that English was beautiful even 1000 years ago, but it would be unintelligible to any of us now. Chaucer and his period moved it forward to about 80 percent intelligible, and of course the near-divine master did the rest. Because of them and others we have the present-day glory of the new masters, the Gods of New Language, who have names like Burgess, Pinter, Burchill, Ronson, Stafford, Moore and Greer and Shone. I sit at their knees and wonder. There are some Americans too, but we needn't detain ourselves there.

Music in its present structure began with Monteverdi. His Vespers 1610 is a collossus of intellect, a work which almost 400 years later still shakes people to the core at their first performance. Mine was at a student concert at the Royal College of Music in South Kensington, when I was 19. How little did I realise as I sat there in near-convulsion how much that work would feature in my life. Its main section, btw, is called Magnificat. Funny old world, innit?

Unlike English, music peaked and then stopped improving. My own theory is that the work of Beethoven and Mozart and Bach was just so good that no-one's been able to better it since. And now no-one dares try. So it's got a bit fossilised. Ossified. But never stagnant - always glorious. Real genius, as the adman said (wrongly) about a farty black drink.

Today I stood close to someone who will (God willing) be born in 2000 AD. We didn't talk, as the person is still a foetus, but it's mother, Kerry is delighted. And dad, Craig, is over the moon, it's reported. Now there's a person who'll never have to calculate how old he/she is! And all his/her life he/she will be able to say...."of course I was conceived in the last millennium". Think about it. And there'll be tons of em. My love and blessings to all three. We haven't written about Kerry yet, but you can revise Craig here.

Copyright magnificat 1997 - 2001
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