THE MOST IMPORTANT DECADE OF MY LIFE.

At the age of 36, I can say whole heartedly that this is the decade to remember. It is also, to be fair, the first decade that I can remember most comprehensively.

The 70′s started with my birth in England and I was watching the Muppet show in 1979 at the age of 6, so the big stories of the 1970′ s would have gone over my head, including the the OPEC oil crisis,the Yom Kippur war, Roe VS Wade, Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War.

I was 17 by the time the 80′s was over and spent most of that decade exploring my chances with the opposite sex rather than educating myself in world politics. I was also going through High School, concentrating on avoiding my homework and experimenting with cigarettes and pot!!

Then came the 90′s. This was the decade of opportunities and screw ups for me. But also the decade that I first took a deep interest in politics. It started in 1997, when Labour Party’s leader, Tony Blair, swept to power in the UK after 18 years of  Tory rule. I will never forget Tony Blair beaming at his adoring political base stating ” A new day has dawned, has it not?!”

I thought, “here is the youngest man ever to be elected British Prime Minister at age 43, and is as politically savvy as I’ve ever seen anyone on the British political scene. He spoke differently too. No more stiff upper lip or super posh accent. He cared about peoples lives and it showed. The Tories had always felt that they were destined to power as a birthright, while Tony Blair went out of his way to try and earn it. (some say he tried too hard)

It was also the decade that I got accepted into a very decent law school and scored the highest point average in my first year out of 350 students. The stars were starting to align themselves very nicely for me . But I was soon to realize that I had demons inside me that were never going away. It was called bi-polar depression – undiagnosed at the time. And was the cause of me dropping out of my second year and frequenting pool halls, potting/gambling and snorting my life away.

Staring at the precipice, I pulled back, but the last three years of the 1990′s I was hardly available to anyone except me, myself and I. And so yet another decade came and went with only fleeting memories.

Come 2000, I found myself a semi decent job as a telecoms real estate specialist (you know all those horrid cell phone towers, well I was responsible for that!) and started an online relationship with a girl in the USA. And then came 9/11.

And that changed my life. Suddenly I was all consumed by politics as there was plenty politics to be discussed. The war in Iraq, Afghanistan, George Bush, and once I moved to the States to marry my wife who I had met online there was health care, a booming housing market, Katrina, Al Quaida, Osama Bin Laden and of course most notibly Barack Obama.

Then there was also YouTube, the rise and fall of MySpace,, MSN and Yahoo; the dominance of Google, the rise of Apple, the stagnation of Microsoft, the rise of Web 20, Facebook, Itunes, web apps and Twitter.

In short there was and is an ongoing technological revolution.

There was also the ongoing extinction of industries like print media, the collapse of the American car industry, the bust in the housing market and the collapse of the banking industry due to extremely questionable, even predatory, lending practices.

It was also the decade that I was diagnosed with a very serious autoimmune disease – which affects my breathing and which has sent me to ICU five times in the last three years.

So this has indeed been a decade that I remember very well, and one which I think will go down in history as a game changing decade, from world geopolitics to personal finances to the tech revolution.

I am glad that I got the opportunity to enjoy the ups and downs of the decade that was the 2000′s.