Chitra Ramaswamy: Is it just me or has 2012 forgotten its own age?

BASICALLY, if 2012 were an outfit, it would be a babydoll dress with wedges fat enough to prop open a fire door.

If it were a person, it would be a Spice Girl. If it were a smell, a pop tart. A sound, the popper pinging on the crotch of a body. OK, I’ll stop now. You get my drift. If not, I'm sorry to have to break it to you but the Nineties are back.

Everywhere you turn it’s the same. Damon Albarn banging on about some Gallagher – again. The Trainspotting lads taking heroin – again. Titanic at the flicks – again. OK, so there are one or two post-millennium twists to keep things contemporary. Damon Albarn is now middle-aged, Irvine Welsh no longer lives in Leith, and, yawn, Titanic is in three dimensions. But let’s face it, the boat still goes down in the end.

My suspicions are confirmed when I meet an old friend for a drink. We survived the Nineties the first time round, mostly in combats and mood rings. These original pieces, once called embarrassing tat, are now considered vintage, by the way. This clever goalpost-moving basically means the clothes you thought were for the charity shop last week now cost double the price and make you feel really old.

First, L orders us both a tequila. So far, so 1996 (as in that was the last time my quivering liver could handle the stuff). I sniff, shudder, set it aside. “I can’t do that any more,” I explain to L. “You know, hangovers, responsibilities.” Then something catches my eye. “Oh my god, you’re not wearing a basque under that jacket, are you?” L pushes her bodiced chest out with pride and a hint of aggression, a very Nineties stance (insert Alanis Morrisette song of choice here).

Hard evidence of the revival, if ever I saw it. A basque, in case you’ve forgotten, is the unfortunate sartorial result of years spent dancing around one’s living room to Madonna’s Blonde Ambition Tour, also known as the How to Wear Underwear as Outerwear Tour, combined with too many late nights in front of Eurotrash. Really, Jean Paul Gaultier has a lot to answer for. Oh, and did I mention that he’s designing costumes for Madonna’s upcoming tour? And so it goes on. I guess I won’t be shwopping my old basque at M&S after all.

Look, I’m not against revivals. I have Fifties cushions on my sofa, a Sixties radiogram in the hall and a medieval pint of milk in the fridge. But I draw the line at the Nineties. This is largely because, apart from giving us the Beavis and Butthead uh-huh-uh-huh laugh (which still, when tacked on the end of any sentence, makes it funny), they sucked.

Come on, people, we don’t need the Nineties. We’re already in a mess. We know, thanks to the Leveson inquiry’s daily drip-drip of dreadfulness, that we can’t trust anyone. We know that no matter how bad we think things are, we don’t know the half of it. And we know that living in the Information Age just means knowing about Simon Cowell’s penchant for colonic irrigation.

On top of all this, New Kids on the Block forming a mutant alliance with Backstreet Boys helps no one. Actually, it makes it all worse. So, no, we don’t need the Nineties. Things aren’t that bad yet. Or, to put a bit of Nineties spin on it, they can only get better.