By Ian Nelson
A digital time capsule from the end of the 20th century

In the late 1990s, I was a 22-year-old software engineer, freshly graduated and working for a major UK bank on the twin terrors of Y2K compliance and Euro currency transition. My working life was steeped in IBM mainframe arcana — Assembler on OS/390, JCL scripts by candlelight, and the comforting hum of legacy systems older than I was.

By day, I debugged date logic, a thankless chore that would lead to a lifetime fascination with calendar systems. By night, I wrote this journal.

Fear and Loathing in Middle England is a candid chronicle of life as a young geek in the dying days of the 20th century. It’s a record of early adulthood in all its messy, glorious contradiction — coding Java applets one minute, climbing Scottish munros the next. I drank too much Jack Daniel’s, bought too many indie CDs, and believed — at least a little — that compilation tapes could save your soul.

Here you’ll find:

• Tangled thoughts on technology, music, and meaning, logged with a biro and later uploaded via 56k modem.
• Glimpses of festival fields, dodgy curry houses, and the elusive quest for a non-streaky car wash.
• Candid reflections on career ambition, introversion, friendship, and that first punch of post-university reality.
• The inescapable presence of late-90s ephemera: dial-up modems, Psions, Bridget Jones, Quiz Machines, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and bollocks-shouting campers at V98 festival.

This was the era before blogs were called blogs. Before Twitter trained us to be concise and Instagram told us to filter everything. It’s a young man’s unfiltered inner monologue, raw and real, full of overthinking, under-sleeping, and just enough misplaced confidence to make things interesting.

Why republish it now?

Because time changes everything — except the bits that don’t.
Because 20-something me deserves a second audience.
Because the old web had soul, and this is a small attempt to restore a piece of it.

So, whether you’re an old friend, a curious stranger, or a nostalgic soul pining for the days of cassettes and catercards, dip in. You don’t have to read it all. Just start somewhere.

The past is a foreign country, but you can visit any time.

“Nothing, nowhere, never, unless it is important.”
— Nicholas Negroponte (quoted in the journal, 3 August 1998)