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Can we agree now? Please? After a decade of two thousand and this, two thousand and that - surely it's time we came to our senses.

It's now 13 long years since I wrote in a newspaper article (The Guardian, 11 November 1997, but not available online, apparently): "The English language counts the centuries in hundreds, not thousands, ten-oh-one, eleven-oh-one, twelve-oh-one, and so on until we get to nineteen-oh-one, twenty-oh-one -- and in due course, twenty-one-oh-one."

So the wretched two-thousand-and-nine at last makes way for the glorious twenty-ten. As I wrote back in 1997: "You probably just about remember the date of the Battle of Hastings. One-thousand-and-sixty-six? Perhaps not. And the date of Queen Victoria's death? One-thousand-nine-hundred-and-one? Of course not."

So that's that, then. The London Olympics? Twenty-twelve. Agreed?

On which note, a happy twenty-ten to you all.

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