Having an exceptionally rammell Millennium Eve

So, you spend an entire year being asked what you’re going to do for New Years Eve 1999. You get offered chances to go to London, Paris, America and Edinburgh, but you tell everyone that you want to spend it at home, tenderly sharing a special moment with your family. Only to find that they’re all going to a house party in Rise Park. So you spend the last seconds of the 20th Century with your kaylide Mam shouting 'Cheer up, you miserable get! It’s the bleddy Millemiun!' at you while she dances to Do Do Do, C’mon And Do The Conga by Black Lace.

The Big Fist

The official greeting of the noughties, the Big Fist’s origins lie with black soldiers in Vietnam  – but it was quickly adopted by males of all races who were terrified at the thought of actually holding another man's hand, as if they wanted to have Bumhole Love with them. A de facto projection of masculinity and strength, the Big Fist slightly let itself down when more then two people were involved; it looked like three coke dealers from St Anns were playing One-Potato Two-Potato Three-Potato Four outside a kebab shop on Mansfield Road.

Calling inanimate objects ‘gay’

We were content to assign emotions to artefacts of rubbishness in the nineties (e.g., 'I’m not going to Broado, it’s sad'), but this decade some of us took it a step further – we wouldn’t be seen dead in Broado because it was ‘gay’. How? Why? Had said shopping centre been seen on NG1 with its shirt off? Was it in a civil partnership with the Bus Station? If only said establishment were homosexual; then it would be tasteful, stylish, and wouldn’t stink of pound shop.

Wanting it to be the eighties again

According to our misguided youth, the eighties were a magical time where everybody pretended to be robots who dressed up like pirates and 17th-century fops. In actual fact, half the youths living in the eighties wanted it to be the sixties again, the other half wanted it to be this decade, and we were all under the reign of a mad old bitch who either put you on the dole or made you do a YTS for £25 a week. Go to Reflex, and watch two middle-aged men with mullets punch each other in the face whilst Club Tropicana is played, over and over again. That’s exactly what the eighties was like.

Lobbing your arse out

What was this all about? For the five percent of women that looked decent in thongs, it was a saucy bit of a fashion thing. For everyone else, it looked wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and resulted in us seeing more man-arse in a half-hour queue at the main Post Office in town than Freddie Mercury did over the course of his entire lifetime. Next decade, expect to see the youth of Nottingham gingerly John-Wayneing down the streets of Hockley with one bollock hanging out of their flies.

Having your dump in a bar interrupted by someone who thinks you’ve got coke

No names, no pack-drill, but if you actually curled one off in certain bars in town, a bell would go off and the entire staff would applaud as you left the bog. And then give you a certificate. Notts was awash with Wanker Powder in the Noughties; great news for men who could go into the same cubicle without aspersions being cast in their direction, but bad news if you just wanted a bob without someone’s head popping over the door. 'Soz mate, I thought you were having a nose-up.' 'Er, you wouldn’t want your nose up this, duck.' 

Telling other kids that Colin Gunn is your uncle

Back in the day, the ultimate bully deterrent at school was to make up an imaginary brother, usually called Andy, who was in the Army and was so rock that he was the only white man to be accepted into the Gurkhas. This decade, the youths of North Notts claimed familial affiliation with a certain local businessman. At a rough estimate, if half these claims were actually true, Mr Gunn would have had approximately 9,364 siblings, all of which would have produced thirteen offspring each.

Moving into a ponce-box in the Lace Market, and then moaning about the noise

At some point in the previous decade, someone decided it would be a great idea if Nottingham had some executive flats, where people could read The Observer in a warehouse whilst drinking poncey coffee, y’know, just like in that Halifax advert with Easy Like Sunday Morning in the background. Unfortunately, no-one realised that there are approximately three executives in Nottingham, and they all live in The Park. Consequently, they were occupied by bell-ends who expected everyone else to take their shoes off and tiptoe about when they piled out of the Market Bar at 2am. Oh dear.