Upon seven or so years' reflection, we can now say that the beginning of the third millennium was a disappointment, unlike its almighty predecessor 1,000 years before. For that triggered mass hysteria across Europe, and led to the rise of "millenarianism", a term which still describes a belief in the imminence of murderous chaos followed by enduring peace on earth.
The millenarianism of AD 1000 has remained fixed within the western psyche, and has informed every revolutionary movement ever since.
The end of the 19th century - as it happened - produced more "millenarianism" than the start of the third millennium. Inspired by the imminent end of the old century, HG Wells wrote War of the Worlds.
Moreover, it was the time of art nouveau, of Sibelius's Finlandia and Elgar's Enigma Variations, of the discovery of X-rays and the electron, of Queen Victoria popping the royal clogs, and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, and of Picasso embarking on his Blue Period.
The first Russian Revolution approached, and in Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers were working on an aerial revolution. Two expressions - "fin de siecle" from France, and "turn of the century" from the US - captured the huge sense of change implicit in the date.
What did we get at the end of the 1990s? We got Windows 98, which is to modern technology what bird flu is to poultry farming. Naturally, I managed to buy a Gateway computer, featuring Windows 98, just days before the manufacturers went belly-up, so I have no one to scream down the phone at whenever it starts talking Finnish to me, or wipes out my next novel without trace, or deletes my vast and laboriously acquired selection of lesbian pornography, or behaves as if it is suffering from pre-senile dementia, (which, as it happens, was first identified by Alois Alzheimer back "at the turn of the century"). Windows 98 has a big brass key at the back, which turns a large coiled-spring inside. Windows 98 is easy to over-wind, and you must regularly oil the cogs, and the main flywheel.
Moreover, remember to clean out the little coal-furnace (which powers the memory) once a week, and always ensure the Windows 98-mainsail is reefed when facing into a nor'-wester.
What else occurred at the end of 20th century? Not much. There was the wholly fictional millennium bug which caused companies around the world to spend billions on preventing what was never going to happen anyway. (Might I interest you in this gizmo which - I guarantee - will give your pet budgerigar 100 per cent protection from attack by giant bird-eating Brazilian tadpoles?) In terms of hysteria, the 2000 millennium bug scare was truly millennial, but unlike the millennial fears of around AD 1000, it completely vanished one second into the new millennium, and now almost no one remembers it. Remembers what? Haven't a clue.
And just about the only cultural phenomenon from the start of the third millennium is Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man - Mass for Peace. This was commissioned - rather improbably - to celebrate the millennium by the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds in England. Which is rather like hearing that the Kingstown and District annual flower show is being sponsored by the Pentagon.
Maybe its unexpected provenance helps explain the unique worldwide popularity of Armed Man. Everywhere, it has seized the popular imagination, perhaps because unlike most classical music of the 20th century, it is clearly and irrefutably music, and does not sound like a cat having its piles cauterised with red-hot needles without the benefit of anaesthetic in B-flat major.
Karl Jenkins used the 15th century French song L'homme armé as the basis for his work. Perhaps this is a primary reason why it has resonated with audiences ever since - the song has apparently been used to create 40 Mass settings - or so say the notes for the last performance of the piece at the National Concert Hall, which I now artfully plagiarise without acknowledging any debt whatever to their author, Paul Kenny. So it is a vital musical text within the history of western culture, repeatedly surfacing since its initial appearance in Cambrai in the middle of the fifteenth century. (But stay! Cambrai was also the home of the first big tank battle in 1917! And 15th century papal choirs were always recruited from Cambrai! And a tank museum in Leeds commissioned the first performance of the Mass! Cambric linen was once made in Leeds! And the word "cambric" is derived from Cambrai! And a new Dan Brown novel is born!)
Actually, the Jenkins Armed Man is thoroughly catholic in its sources: it uses the original Burgundian verse - L'homme armé doibt on doubter - then quotes from the Koran, the haunting Arabic Allahu Akbar Ashadu An La ill-a-L-Lah, then the Greek of the tridentine mass, Kyrie Eleison, with excerpts from Kipling, Dryden, Swift, Tennyson and the Mahabharata.
It is perhaps the only work from the 21st century which so far unmistakably bears the characteristic of enduring art: it speaks to people everywhere, but is palpably rooted in western European Christian culture.
When performed in the National Concert Hall last November, it started a furious exchange in the epistolary acres which lie on my western and southern approaches, obliging me to mobilise my columnar FCA. If you want to know what all the fuss was about, the next performance of The Armed Man is at 8pm on Saturday week, April 1st, at Holy Cross Church, Clonliffe Road, with the Mater Dei Chorale, conducted by Eithne Donnelly. Ring 01 8376027 for tickets.