Decade of mumbo jumbo

"I don’t like Mondays.” Most of us share the sentiment of the old Boomtown Rats refrain. According to the Office for National Statistics, Monday registers the peak in suicides each week. But there was a notable exception to the weekly rule – Saturday 1 January, 2000.

Precisely why this proved to be such a popular day isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps the dawn of a new year, new decade, new century and new millennium all at the same moment proved too much for some. It might instead have been fear of the so-called “millennium bug”, that supposed glitch in the world’s computerised technological infrastructure that many commentators had, quite incorrectly as it transpired, thought would spell the end of civilisation as we knew it.