Two Decades of Change?

It is nearly two decades since I got married.  How is that possible, I ask myself?  I mean, I got married last century for goodness sake! 1998.

So much has changed.  From where I live and how I work to having children and a dog.  We have sadly lost many people of course.  But we have also gained them - a wonderful sister-in-law and nephew for starters.  I think I lost myself for a while in the middle of it all.  I didn't mentally take well to babies and small children.  But essentially, I think I am now in a happy place.  I think I am carrying the twenty years okay.

Looking back, organising a wedding in 1998 was a very different experience.  No hotel websites, no travel planning, no Pinterest to plan complicated table decor or find the perfect dress.  Gift lists were done in person at shops.  Disposable cameras on the tables - no phone cameras or social media.  I have books and books of photos but nothing online to take reprints from!

But what about the state of the world in the last two decades?  Clinton was US president, Blair was UK Prime Minister.  Princess Diana had only been dead for a year.  Saddam Hussein was still alive.  The Twin Towers were still standing.  No such thing as smart phones and the internet was something you mainly used at work because the connections were so slow on home computers.  

And yet, when you Google '1998', the Wikipedia page is sadly familiar.  The details are different but the larger events are the same.  Massacres, plane crashes, 'authorised air raids', earthquakes, nuclear testing, North Korea, train disasters and tentative space exploration, to name but a few.  Even the 1998 World Cup final shows depressingly little difference.  France beat Brazil 3-0.  Same teams on the same merry-go-round.  And apparently fashion is currently having a '1990s moment'.  As if one go round at platform trainers, cargo pants and crop tops was not enough.

With twenty more years experience and twenty years of technological change, you would have thought there would have been more progress on the big questions like 'is there life in outer space?' or 'how do we deal better with earthquakes/floods/droughts?'  But no.  Humans seem to put more effort into arguing amongst themselves - often via violence - than working together to solve the problems facing our planet as a whole.  We still haven't even managed to feed everyone.  In fact the rich/poor divides are much worse in many places.

I'll be pushing seventy if I see our ruby wedding anniversary in twenty years time.  I may well be a grandparent by then.  I do hope we as a race have made more progress by then.  It's about time.

By the way, Friends was already on our television screens.  Do you like my 1990s 'Rachel' wedding hair...