Doomsday couple split after disaster fails to strike

WHEN Angela and James Perron came to Scotland in January last year, they were a gift for newspapers hungry for Y2K millennium bug scare stories.

Moving north from Bath in the south west of England, they came because they feared a return to pre-civilisation when the year 2000 brought computer failure and world-wide crisis. They relocated in Dunphail, near Forres, to begin a life of self-sufficiency.

They warned of panic in the streets and, at worst, "an accidental release of radiation or a nuclear warhead fired by mistake. If that happens, then we are all doomed."

When January brought no immediate signs of disaster Angela, who ran a publishing firm, and her husband James declared that nobody could consider disaster had been avoided until April or May.

Now that prediction has come back to haunt them, with the revelation this weekend that the couple, who have two children, are to divorce.

It is a disheartening end to a story which captured the public imagination, as Angela admitted, speaking exclusively to the Sunday Herald. "A kind of mythology grew up about us, not all of which was true," she said. "I'm not proud of the fact that it has happened to me but we never set ourselves up as an icon of modern family life, so we don't feel that we have anything to be ashamed of."

In many ways the Perrons' story captured the zeitgeist last year. With computer experts warning that any device operating on microchips could break down, unable to deal with the date "rollover" from 1999 to 2000, here was a family taking them at their word and fleeing to the hills. Food was stockpiled in their remote farmhouse, emergency contingencies were organised, a vegetable plot established. Doomsday approached, yet the Perrons intended to survive it.

"I think we were actually quite brave," said the woman who once advised President Clinton's office on the Y2K issue. "We did believe passionately in the cause - that everybody should have the chance of following the American Red Cross advice of having two to three weeks of extra food, fuel and other supplies available in case of the worse case scenario."

Now however, she has grown weary of the media, which she knows will make capital out of her marital split. "Some over-imaginative segments of the media are attempting to make a scandal out of our split up which is cruel and unnecessary," she said, and added that this would be the last newspaper interview she would give, as the family now wished to be left alone.

"We did our best to keep the family together, but we didn't manage it. Still, we like to think we helped people be ready for the millennium bug, and perhaps our story helped to encourage companies to work harder to be ready, I don't know."

The Perrons plan to stay in Scotland for now. "We came here because we wanted to be part of a local, more self-reliant community which can survive if computers let us down - for whatever reason," said Angela, a former director of an ME charity who was instrumental in shifting public opinion about the reality of the illness. She also worked for Friends of the Earth as one of their London office's main campaigners and promoted the importance of sleep for new mums, publishing a book on the subject, The Good Sleep Guide for You and Your Baby.

Although reluctant to talk of their break-up, Jeremy Perron also maintains he is proud of what they achieved. "I am a private person and I don't relish this sort of intrusion, but I will say that, despite everything, the move to Moray was one of the best things I have ever done," he said.

"Obviously I am saddened by the breakdown, but we are dealing with it as adults. The kids are happy, I see them a lot. Life goes on." He is currently working for local publishing firms.

He is unrepentant about the decision to move and to highlight potential millennium problems. "We were very worried about are Western societies increasing over dependence on computers.

"We had the best case scenario with the millennium bug but it could have been a lot worse," he added. "We can see how just one little virus such as the Love Bug can bring huge multinational corporations to a standstill."

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.