People love anniversaries. All those fireworks being set off tonight are celebrating an anniversary, as are all those poppies people are wearing, that special National Lottery 10th birthday draw tomorrow night and all that tinsel your local council has dared to drape across the high street. Barely a day goes by without some big long newspaper article recalling the way things used to be, or the scheduling of some TV documentary about some not-so-recent event, or the publication of some lavish account of something that happened a number of years ago ending in zero.
I love anniversaries too. You must have noticed because my blog is fullofthem. I'm not quite sure why I love anniversaries so much but I think it's because they're an excuse to remember, and I love remembering. It can look a little gauche to blog about some seemingly random scrap of nostalgia, but if I link those memories to an anniversary then suddenly my blogpost has an acceptable reason to exist. I nearly devoted yesterday to the 35th anniversary of my first day at school, for example, except that George Bush got in the way of a few twee reminiscences about my initial meeting with the class guineapig. Somehow it doesn't feel right to talk about that anniversary a day late.
The media have the opposite problem. They don't seem able to wait for the exact date of an anniversary any more but instead insist on getting their article, programme or book out in advance, just in case someone else's anniversary tribute beats them to it. The BBC documentary about the Brighton bomb blast, for example, was broadcast a whole four weeks too early, generating a flurry of publicity but ensuring that when the real 20th anniversary came round a month later there was nothing left to say. Then there tomorrow's rather premature '10th birthday' National Lottery draw. A huge marketing blitz is underway and lots of old presenters are being wheeled out for a 'special' lottery TV show tomorrow night, whereas in reality the real anniversary of the first draw is still a fortnight away. Why so early? The Poppy Appeal also seems to start earlier every year (Remembrance Sunday is still more than a week away you know) and, as for Christmas, enough said. Can nobody bear to wait for the correct day more?
Today really is the 399th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. I'm surprised that nobody has yet jumped the gun and decided to celebrate Guy Fawkes' quatercentenary a year early, perhaps with a Simon Schama documentary, a souvenir pullout in the Daily Mail or a collection of commemorative porcelain fireworks. But I bet that somebody out there is already writing a book on the subject ("Stands Treason", perhaps) or filming a six-part BBC2 historical drama about Catholic oppression ("Knives and Fawkes", maybe). It was also the 199th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar a couple of weeks ago (which explains why I saw Trafalgar Square covered in gleaming white seamen the other weekend). All of which suggests that we're in for a gigantic double mega-anniversary fortnight this time next year. Or, sadly, a month or two before this time next year instead...
