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Back in the seventies or eighties some sage of fashion wisdom declared that brown was the new black. Had black, indeed, vanished for good from the colour spectrum to be replaced evermore by a standard chocolate shade? This seeming paradox, that is, x is the new y, has infiltrated the vernacular as an indication of newness, nowness, perfect, non-obsolete up-to-dateness much as the suffixes “-gate” and “-athon” respectively denote political scandal and superhuman endurance, but how far can one stretch it?

I hear that “food is the new sex”. This is nothing new. Oddly. Food has been the new sex ever since the early nineties and let’s not forget that pesto was the quiche of the eighties. Food, thus, is the old sex and the new sex and possibly even the future of sex. This, I must confess, confuses literal-minded old me. I envision couples eyeing each other across the tables in romantic restaurants, winking knowingly at one another in anticipation of going home, shoving some Big Maybelle on the stereo, cracking open a bottle of pinot and indulging in a hot, intimate, satisfying… meal? What next? The first, fumbling chicken satay at the door marks the beginnings of intimacy and announces to the world that one is “going steady”? Dodgy bars in darkened alleys will cater to men who aren’t getting enough… steak, egg and chips from their wives, who will in turn begin to focus on the pizza delivery man, the next-door neighbour who sports his own bread-kneader, the chef from the local bistro to satisfy their waxing, unrelenting appetites? And what of the sultry Italian beauty down the street who, in addition to possessing an obscenely, gloriously over-endowed larder not only reputedly gives great marinara but also washes her pasta-maker in a bikini on the driveway every Saturday morning? Forget cloning; in the decades to come one’s progeny will be cooked up in a pre-burnished terracotta crock-pot from @home with a secret combination of cumin, MSG, ketchup and lemon zest? Perhaps digging a hole in the sand and baking potatoes and mielies therein will become the new natural childbirth.

But I digress.

My point, now that I have taken my appetite suppressants, is that every season there comes a new fad. As has happened with fashion over the last twenty years, it seems that we have run out of newly ludicrous haberdasheries in which to drape our bodies and activities with which to divert ourselves from the swish and fizzle of modern life and so have begun to recycle our old ones. Case in point: who on God’s green earth (and this category, naturally, excludes the fashion industry in general) could ever have predicted the return of the bellbottom? The day-glo legwarmer? The wrap-around ballet jersey? Or, most horrifying of all, the Ewok-skin furboot with koala-bollock accessory?

The same has begun to happen with pastimes. Twenty-odd years ago came Tim Rice’s and the blokes from Abba’s musical Chess and suddenly the game, previously the province of spotty, bespectacled types (among whose number I proudly counted myself during my school days) became cool. Jump forward a few years and, with the rise of grunge and disobedience rock (or whatever it was called), Dungeons and Dragons followed hard on the heels of lumberjack shirts and jackboots as a fashion statement. Just last year or the year before, celebrity knitting, something even Monty Python would have dismissed as too far-fetched to be even remotely funny, hit the scene. There were celebrity knitting magazines, picturing Madonna and pal Gwynneth Paltrow out for a girl’s knit on the town together, J-Lo and hubby #18 thumbing up a pair of booties backstage at the Grammies, probably even Eminem (although this may just have been a figment of my imagination) finally breaking the silence with Kim for long enough to rent a hotel suite and get down to some sweet, reconciliatory needle-knocking.

In the nineties Japan gave us a few new fads – things that had not been done before or, at least, were technologically-inspired updates of old ideas. We had tamagochis (a kind of battery-operated pet rock that squealed at you when you failed to love it enough) and karaoke. They gave us old stuff back too – Hello Kitty enjoyed a brief revival; but karaoke enjoyed a brief fling in Western society as the thing to do on a night out or at home with a few friends over quiche and caprése.

Karaoke, though, never became the new sex. Singing in public is more a form of indecent exposure – a great idea at the time, but often tempered the next morning by shame, regret and what I like to call chanteuse’s remorse.