What is the Millennium Dome for? For that matter, what is the Millennium for? 2,000 years of Christian religion: piety, bigotry, racism. Break out the party hats, warm up the trifle. But that's just it: the Dome doesn't have to justify itself because we have the calendar for that. The null-click of all those noughts and the publics' purse falls open. Casino slots. Vegas on the Isle of Dogs. All those nothings in a row and ker-ching! 'So there the Dome was, meaningless and magnificent, a pale intruder on the downriver mud.'

Iain Sinclair doesn't like it. Obviously. But not liking this 'blob of congealed correction fluid' is a national sport. Or at least would be if the nation cared enough to care at all. The Dome, for Sinclair, is the epitome of the New Labour legacy: one that will not stand for a thousand years. It's a temporary commemoration of a tenuous event, 'a flick of Tipp-Ex to revise the mistakes of 19th-century industrialists.' By which token we almost argue our way right around back of our opposition. It makes virtual sense.

This is what Sorry Meniscus (Iain Sinclair's cantankerous, beautifully-etched Dome essays for The London Review of Books collected in one slim volume) realises. The point - the focus - of our celebration is literally spiked by huge yellow cocktail-sticks on a beached tent. A huge tent, granted, a monumental tent, yes, but a tent. A big-top gone native. It's all in the nomenclature. We speak of the Dome, not its ephemeral content. The Millennium Experience. It's not a Festival of Britain. It's the shell, the chocolate, not the soft centre. In view of its location, 'perhaps they should consider a giant grey homburg, commissioned from Claes Oldenburg, in memory of Jack McVitie?' Sinclair has the measure. The Dome, he argues, should never have existed outside of imagination. As a computer model; a literal experience in headsets and marquees on village greens across our land. Or as Rachel Whiteread's House existed; exists. A veritable ghost.

But no, here it stands, a space waiting to be filled with a patent 'PG' certificate, Blairite, Ronald McDonald, don't-scare-the-horses experience. Somewhere even those other great National Institutions, The Queen Mother and former Dome-czar Peter Mandelson can feel equally at home. A tasteful Laura Ashley fisting club built at the public's expense. A camp-site sponsorship opportunity lovingly massaged by the Albert Speer of The National Lottery. An experience whose greatest achievement is to book a place on the opening titles for EastEnders. Branding. Rebranding. New Labour. Cool Britannia. One of Ballard's terminal beaches amended to the tourist trail.

No, scratch that. The Dome makes an explosive starring appearance beneath 007's well-shod feet in The World Is Not Enough. A billion buck Bond film set. Success! That'll be something to tell the grandkids.