You'll find yourself crawling around in the dark eating canned tuna on your living room floor and not knowing where the champagne bottle has gone. You know, freezing in the middle of winter, you won't have any heat -- a hell of a way to celebrate your millennium.

If this is the frenzy now, what's it going to be like the last week of December?

If the 'millennium bug' has any truth, you're counting down 10-9-8 to zero and at the moment you scream, 'Happy new year!' or 'Happy millennium!' the lights all over the planet will go out,

[The book also includes a segment on] How to be the first death of the millennium. ... quite a legal warning.

It was clear to me that reality was catching up with satire so fast that somebody might read this essay on how to have the December 31 baby and obey it,

I've got to say it's been a lot of fun to do, and in a way it really has been a protection. Honestly, I think otherwise I'd have stopped reading newspapers, magazines, books and would have had to go and hide on a remote island until December 1999. When, of course, the jumbo jets would have arrived and I'd have had to flee.