The new millennium

The new millennium marks a personal threshold in the Mayhew family’s life, not simply a change of era. With Jasmine Mayhew born on its third day, the century becomes a measure of her age; for Dexter Mayhew, meanwhile, its opening months bring fatherhood, unemployment, a move to Richmond, and a growing distance between his ideal of family life and its daily reality.

A Century Begins in a Birth

Jasmine Alison Viola Mayhew is born late in the evening of the new millennium’s third day, weighing six pounds and six ounces. Dexter regards her as inexpressibly beautiful and feels certain he would give his life for her, even as he recognizes that such a sacrifice is unlikely to be required. Her birth gives the broad historical marker an intimate scale: she will always be as old as the century.

The arrival prompts Dexter to make a solemn resolution in his hospital chair. He intends to act as if Jasmine were always watching, to avoid causing her pain, anxiety, or embarrassment, and to have nothing in his life of which to be ashamed. The resolve lasts about ninety-five minutes. Trying to smoke in a hospital toilet cubicle, he sets off the detector; the alarm wakes his exhausted wife and daughter, and Sylvie Mayhew’s narrowed look makes the gap between his declaration and his conduct immediately visible.

Work and Domestic Change

As the new century begins, Dexter finds himself without work or prospects. The broadcast slot for Sport Xtreme has drifted toward dawn, and the series ends after attracting too few viewers to sustain it. His paternity leave gives way to unemployment, making the new era a marker not only of his family’s expansion but also of his professional decline.

A change of home offers temporary distraction. After resisting the move, Dexter and Sylvie rent out his bachelor flat in Belsize Park and settle in a terraced house in Richmond, Surrey. The move is justified by practical attractions: good schools, transport links, proximity to Sylvie’s parents, and deer in the park. Their new home, however, immediately demands expensive work. In May they begin sanding its wooden surfaces and removing non-supporting walls; Dexter’s sports car is exchanged for a secondhand people carrier that still smells of the previous family’s communal sickness.

The Century Against the Family Ideal

Dexter had imagined domestic life as an attractive, easy sequence of shared tasks and pleasures: decorating together, walking dogs, managing night-feeds with good humour, taking Jasmine to rock pools and beach fires, and providing for his dependants. In this imagined future, he would invent games, put up shelves, and settle into the role of a responsible husband and father.

Instead, the renovation is accompanied by bickering, meanness, and sullen looks through plaster dust. Sylvie increasingly spends time at her parents’ house, ostensibly to escape the builders and more often to avoid her listless, ineffectual husband. She suggests that Dexter take up their friend Callum’s offer of work, but he resists, hoping his presenting career might recover or that he could find work as a producer, cameraman, or editor. While he waits, his practical contribution is modest: he makes tea, fetches biscuits, picks up some basic Polish, and plays PlayStation amid the floor-sander’s noise.

Meaning of the New Millennium

The new millennium holds two competing measures of time. For Jasmine, it is the beginning against which her whole lifetime will be counted. For Dexter, the same opening period exposes how quickly an emphatic promise can falter: his pledge to live beyond reproach lasts less than two hours, and the anticipated rewards of fatherhood and home-making do not arrive in the form he expected.

The contrast is not between a past and a suddenly transformed future so much as between a fresh beginning and habits that persist into it. A new century brings a child, a move, and the prospect of reshaping a home, but it does not by itself restore Dexter’s career or repair the tension in his marriage. The era’s promise is therefore grounded in ordinary, unfinished work: providing for a family, living up to a promise, and making a shared home amid frustration.