On The End Of Days

Spiders I can just about handle, snakes don’t scare me and I’m not afraid of the dark - but one thing that always causes me to lose sleep is the end of the world. N has given up trying to talk sense into me - it’s no use. While I understand that if the world is to end there’s very little I can do about it, I would at least change the way I live my life. Take 2012 for example - if the pesky Mayans are correct, we have less than two years left. If I knew this to be true, there's no way in hell that I’d be pissing about trying to pay off debt and working long hours to keep my job safe. Nay, nay and nay again. I would have hundreds of credit cards and I’d be enjoying the jet-setting, globe-trotting playboy lifestyle for which I was born.

But there’s the problem, there’s absolutely no way I can ascertain whether it’s true because, basically, people can’t predict the future. Can they? This should be enough to put my mind at ease but it doesn’t - and this isn’t the first time I’ve felt like this. This isn’t the first time that some ancient trouble-maker has disrupted my sleeping pattern. Far from it, in fact.

I can’t remember the year in which this occurred, but I was at primary school. Normally, the playground at lunchtime was a picture of gender segregation - the boys playing football and the girls skipping around the edge. However, this day was different. The gossip in the queue for the water fountain did not revolve around which two 9 year-olds had decided to get married or whether Mrs Appleton was in a good mood. The shouting, laughing and crying had given way to a feverish whispering. A huddle of children, girls and boys [all in their hideous maroon uniforms] gathered in the middle of the playground.

You see, somebody had heard their parents talking. The world was, so they said, going to end before the year was out. Suddenly football, kiss-chase and skipping were of secondary importance - before any of that could resume, we wanted to know how the End of Days would occur. Many a theory was ventured; alien invasion, asteroid collision, flood. One girl, from a devoutly religious family, offered the warm and fluffy opinion that God would make everybody on earth look in the same direction, and send a wave to hit them in the back of the head, so that we wouldn't see anything coming. Others drew their inspiration from less than divine sources, and feared invasion by killer tomatoes or biker mice from Mars. Anyway, the year passed and, perhaps to the disappointment of some, the world survived and secondary school began.

As if teenage angst doesn’t make life difficult enough, my secondary school years were overshadowed by predictions of the world ending in 1999. Good old Nostradamus and the Millennium Bug had consigned the planet to the Universal Recycle Bin in the sky. Of course, it fizzled out in an extraordinarily anti-climactic fashion - the planes still flew, the computers still worked, the new millenium still dawned and Nostradamus experts continued to predict apocalypse every year thereafter.

I should, by now, be sufficiently experienced in Armageddon-scares to be unaffected by the Mayan prophecy, all the more because I’ve heard that this interpretation of what’s written is questionable and discounted by many experts, but I can’t help but worry. I would feel hugely hard done by should it come true. I was going to have a country-themed fancy dress party to mark the start of the London 2012 Olympics, and it’s not really fair that I should die without ever achieving the global fame I deserve, but the ball is not in my court. I shall just have to wait and [after a nervous breakdown in December 2012] see.