These ridiculous dates far into the future seem to mean nothing at the time.
I think there was some talk of an asteroid hitting Earth in 2027, or was it 2029? I didn't make a note in my diary at the time.
More recently there was a lot of debate on the Local Plan for Haverhill, which predicted growth to 2016.
Planners tend to work in a world of such distant dates, but for the rest of us, we just mutter grimly: "I don't even know if I'll still be around by then," and get on with something more immediate.
However, as you get older, you realise that distant dates have a horrible habit of eventually coming round.
When I was a teenager I read George Orwell's 1984 and, although I calculated how old I would be by that date, had no clear idea that it would happen as quickly as it actually did.
Then there was the Millenium – an almost unimagineable concept when I first thought about it at the age of nine or ten.
It was difficult enough to come to terms with the idea of moving from the 1960s – the only decade I had really known – into the 1970s, let alone ditching the 19 altogether and going into the 21st century.
But it has all happened, and the ancient age which I calculated I would be when it did is now, sadly, long in the past.
And so we move into 2008, a date to conjure with for me and those like me, if not for everyone else.
For 2008 was the magical date at the end of my mortgage.
During the 1990s it seemed an impossibly long time away – a Utopia which would never come.
As it happened, circumstances changed and I managed to unload the thing a few years ago now – just as well, because it was an endowment mortgage and, like many others, would have fallen well short, leaving me dreading 2008 as the year in which I would have to find several thousand to cover the shortfall.
The moral of all this is that one should plan for the future, however distant or unlikely it may be.
Just because we have no way of knowing what is coming next, doesn't mean that it is advisable to ignore it altogether.
I feel sorry for the up-and-coming generation because they live in such a fast-changing world there is no way they can even guess as well as I could what they might need in 40 to 50 years.
Pensions, both private and state, are very mercurial at the moment, mortgages are huge and credit is not only equally huge, but also massively expensive, tying you into debt for decades to come.
If the western world is living beyond its means, 2008 might turn out to be a year to remember for very unpleasant reasons.
Meanwhile there are new distant dates for me to look out for, now hoving into view at a remarkable pace – the London Olympics, the centenary of World War I, my retirement, the end of my driving licence...