Everyone will be celebrating the Millennium on December 31 1999 and I'll be joining them

"Everyone will be celebrating the Millennium on December 31 1999 and I'll be joining them. It doesn't matter what you tell people."Such conjecture also seems rather pointless to Bob Johnson. He too expects to be celebrating the Millennium in his home on whatever year they call it. He's been celebrating New Year's Eve in his Feathers Place house since 1931 when he was three.

"I'd like to climb up the hill to the Observatory with everyone else, but I had a mild stroke in 1994 and I'm not sure I'll make it to the top. I'll probably just invite some friends round and watch the fireworks from here." !. June Is Britain's magic month of strawberries, champagne, Ascot, summer balls at Oxford and Cambridge and parties everywhere. By tradition, the art and antiques trade has always joined in the festivities, making June London's mega-art month, with sumptuous antiques fairs in West End hotels and magnificent works of art for sale in the auction rooms This year is no exception. Museum curators and the super-rich will be pouring into London over the next few weeks to do their shopping. Ordinary mortals can visit the multitude of temporary exhibitions laid on for the big buyers' benefit - if they know where to go and when. Strictly speaking the Millennium doesn't begin until January 1, 2001.

The first, called Bradley's Meridian, because the line was taken from where James Bradley, the third Astronomer Royal, set up his telescope, was the accepted Meridian until 1850. The Ordnance Survey, whose first map was published in 1801, still uses it today as their Longitude 0.Another ploy is to wait until after everyone has celebrated the Millennium in 1999 before attempting to buy a house on the Meridian. The first, and arguably real line of Meridian, is 19ft to the east of the one from where we measure time today. The most obvious is to find a house on the Meridian outside Greenwich. The Meridian circles the world and passes through thousands of homes in other parts of the UK. "But," says Ms Blyzinksy, "no-one seems particularly excited about living on the Meridian in Hull or Peashaven."A more promising fact is that the Greenwich Meridian is not the original one. "I don't think I'll be going anywhere, money doesn't mean that much to me now.