But we didn’t. Not this time. The year slid from one number to another without any but private disasters to make the day unbearable. One woke up with a new number for the date and a moderately new attitude. Got through that one, at least!

With many changes, large and small. For me, an American not likely to travel in Europe any time soon, a mind-boggling but distant change is the demise, possibly temporary, of one of the world’s oldest currencies, the drachma.

I am lucky to have travelled twice in Greece. Therefore, like most tourists, I have a small pile of coins and bills from my travels which I kept in hopes of seeing Athens and Delphi again. I might see them again but the coins with the heads of ancient gods and the bills with temples and heroes are no good any more.

Apparently, if you are within reach of a very international bank, you can take a little sack of European money into the bank and give it away for charitable purposes or convert it into the bland Euro, useful for crossing borders but useless for invoking millenial, historical reflections.

The franc doesn’t cause this overwhelming nostalgia, though I have a little horde of French and Swiss coins. Only the drachma really seems a dreadful loss. If I were in charge of things, which I’ve never been, I would have made the drachma the European standard, with the pictures of Zeus and Athena to fly through the markets of the world unimpeded.

So we slipped into the next year without the lira and with London still burdened by the orphaned Millenium Dome. Things could be worse. We all know that now, but the sun is shining, the year is a new one and there is Hope with wings but not with her portrait on currency.