AND so, with tedious predictability, it turns out that we’re all still here.
The Mayans were wrong all along, the world did not end last week, which is bad news for anyone who didn’t bother doing their Christmas shopping on the grounds that this old planet wouldn’t live to see the 25th.
As I heard someone remark, it was always unlikely that the Mayans would be able to predict the end of the world, since they had failed to anticipate the demise of their own civilisation. What chance do you have of spotting the Apocalypse when you can’t even make out those Spanish galleons on the horizon?
The Mayans are not the first, and they won’t be the last civilisation to predict our doom. There are evangelists in the US who make a living out of telling their flock that the end is nigh.
And, like a stopped clock, eventually one of them will be right – though hopefully long after everyone reading this column is long gone.
In the meantime, as the Mayans proved last week, the doom sayers can provide the rest of us with some much-needed entertainment.
I am reminded of a story my B&B owner told me when I visited Jerusalem in 2001.
Unsurprisingly, given the city’s connection to various fairy tales, it attracted its fair share of apocalyptics in the run-up to the millennium.
One group, he told me, firmly believed that the world would end at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999 and that God would call a surprisingly select group of chosen people up to Heaven from a field on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
For reasons best known to themselves, these people were also of the view that the Almighty would not be accepting the clothed into His kingdom, so they all stripped off as the hour approached.
Apparently, passing Jerusalemites, who were celebrating New Year in more traditional style, remarked on the foolishness of these naked devotees as they awaited the end.
“We’ll be laughing in a few minutes,” the believers must have thought as midnight approached.
The clock struck 12 and then…well, nothing.
Planes didn’t fall from the sky, cash machines didn’t stop working and the world didn’t come to an end.
But there’s one thing I’ve always wanted to know about these idiots standing around naked in a field in Jerusalem: when did they give up?
I imagine there must have been an atmosphere of feverish excitement in the build-up to midnight followed by the slow recognition that Old Man Earth had a few years left in him yet.
How long before the devotees gave up? A few minutes? An hour? Two?
Surely, by around 4am even the most committed must have realised they were wrong – and started praying that Jerusalem stretched to a 24-hour clothes shop.
