The hardest thing in life is knowing when it's over. Realising that your moment's passed, the mojo's gone, you are now in that terrible zone where the harder you try to make yourself relevant, the more it shows how past it you are.

And no, I'm not talking about Gordon Brown. I'm thinking of another overhyped phenomenon of the past decade I never really bought into which, mercifully, we sent packing. But which is now attempting a Fatal Attraction-style recovery from beneath the bath-water.

Sex and the City.

The television series that defined, better than any, the vapidity of the Nineties, the era that gravity forgot, the weightless decade, is making a comeback. The weekend papers were full of Sarah Jessica Parker profiles and puff pieces. I know that some Nineties phenomena (recessions, repossessions, leadership challenges, the Clintons) are once more dominating our media. But it's not a direction I think many of us relish.

SATC is not, it should be said, coming back in its original TV format, but hitting the big screen instead. Where, I expect, it's destined to join other attempts to turn TV shows into blockbusters (Are You Being Served?, On the Buses, Starsky and Hutch) in that special corner of the cinematic landscape designated The Turkey Farm.

The reason I'm so certain that the SATC movie will flop like a discarded corsage into the black bin bag of history is the reason it had to disappear from our screens in the first place. It had become not just dated, but embarrassingly so. Like Kim Cattrall's character, Samantha, it was a poignant creation, attempting to hold back the years by taking refuge in an increasingly shallow hedonism while a new seriousness was gripping everyone else.

The New York of SATC is very much a pre 9/11, pre-credit-crunch city, a playground made safe by the Giuliani reforms and rich by the long low inflation boom of the Nineties. Like Edwardian London or Twenties Paris, it's a pleasure cruiser where the passengers' blithe obliviousness to the iceberg ahead only adds to the gaiety, and only distances their world from our own.

Trying to re-create the mood of that decade, trying to recapture the blithe self-indulgence of that time on screen, is an impossible venture. It's like the Victorians' effort to imbue the church of their time with medieval piety. Our experiences make the recapture of such innocence impossible. But more than that, the fundamental frivolity and solipsism that SATC celebrated - sex as a consumer good, consumer goods as a route to ecstasy, relationships to be discar- ded as easily as last season's fashions, fashion the most fulfilling relationship in a woman's life - is not just out of date but plain bad taste.

Thinking that a revival of SATC is just what we need to cheer us all up is like arguing that the best response to a repossession notice is placing an order with Osborne & Little - the solution to reduced circumstan- ces is simply more self-indulgence.

Of course, some will argue that a return to the world of SATC can be comforting nostalgia at a time like ours. But even though it's bad news that has propelled us into a different world from the cosy environment that Carrie fashioned for herself, it's good news that we've moved away from her time and her values.

SATC was never about liberation, but simply presented a new model of thralldom for women. In the Fifties women may have been trapped in domesticity, while told they should be grateful for the security, but SATC trapped its women in a world of pure image and artifice and told them that they should be grateful for the glamour. The image of ideal womanhood that SATC celebrated was uniformly thin to the point of anorexia, hairstyled to catwalk perfection and on trend to the point of exhaustion. Women were also encouraged to be sexually competitive in a way that made the men they pursued not individuals who were destined to become intimates but captive animals to parade, and then dissect, in front of others.

At the same time as Carrie Bradshaw was writing her journalism, and generating both the material and the outlook that Sarah Jessica Parker and others brought to the screen, another female journalist was anatomising the New York of the time with much greater rigour. Peggy Noonan, the former White House speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist, also reflected on the city at the end of the Nineties and the turn of the millennium, and she saw the emptiness of life lived in purposeless vanity, of a great and vibrant city celebrated for the opportunities it offered to pleasure-seekers. The Rome of the 4th Century, not the 1st.

It may seem shrill and puritan to anathematise with such vigour a show about shoes and sex in which the worst that can happen is a heel coming loose or a boyfriend telling you to get lost. But it's precisely because SATC was so shallow, and the age it typified so self-indulgent, that it deserves to be remembered as an episode in emptiness.

During the Nineties our conversations seemed to shrink to SATC dimensions. The Clinton presidency, instead of being dominated by discussion of how we should help Bosnia and Rwanda or meet the growing challenge of Islamism, became consumed by sexual politics. Both the President and his critics indulged themselves instead of looking to their responsibilities. And the consequences were far from trivial. Here in Britain, we allowed the baroque catalogue of sleaze allegations, not a lack of direction, to become the dominant indictment of our rulers. And so our vision narrowed.

It's a funny thing, the shift of a generation's mood. And it can often catch one unawares. But the mood that SATC captured disappeared a while back. We won't lift our spirits by drinking champagne that went flat years ago.

Is 40 too old to start surfing?

Reading Tim Winton's marvellous new novel Breath last week I found myself, for the first time in my life, wanting to try surfing.

I have, for most of the past 40 years, avoided clambering on to a surfboard and seeking to make the ocean my plaything for the same reason that John Prescott and Johnny Vegas have given it a miss. We're all a bit too bookish for that kind of thing.

But having read Winton's descriptions of surfing, I can understand the pull of the waves. It's not just the physical detail of handling yourself amid the swell and roil of the sea, but also the psychological detail of how intense life is when there is no room for reflection or hesitation in your mind, simply a concentration on risk, action and survival.

Winton has his hero talk of being “fully present” and it's a problem with all our lives that pure immersion in the moment is so rare. The heightening of feeling that comes from pure concentration on a physical test, with an element of danger that demands our full focus, is the purest route to being fully present. The closest I've come to what Winton describes is skiing. But surfing seems to possess an elemental quality that transcends even that. I'd love to read your thoughts on what the best way of being “fully present” might be. And could you also let me know, is 40 too old to surf?

A star is born

Like a Victorian public school, Britain's Got Talent thrives on cruelty.

Part of the pull of the show is watching terrible acts being torn to pieces by an audience goaded into mass bullying by Simon Cowell, the Harry Flashman of light entertainment.

But what redeems everything are those moments when a Star genuinely is Born. And on Saturday night, when Dean did his routine from Miss Saigon, a shiver ran down the nation's spine. Here was a lad who'd hidden his talent at school, for fear of being bullied, singing his way into the nation's heart. It's one TV moment that I was glad I was fully present for.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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