DO you want the good news or the bad news first?

Okay, then. This summer is mainly going to be a stinker, according to independent long-term forecast experts Positive Weather Solutions.

June will have heavy rain, thunder storms and flash flooding and rain will continue through July in the North of England. Mind you, August might have some hot days if you haven’t been washed away by then.

The Meteorological Office, meanwhile, refuses to give a long term forecast because they have been wrong before. Remember the promise of a barbecue summer? They say it is too difficult to predict what will happen in three months time, never mind four or five months.

Which brings us to the good news.

It doesn’t really matter what the weather men say, because the end of the world is due to begin on May 21. If we are to believe Harold Egbert Camping, a preacher from Oakland, California, the Second Coming of the Lord will happen on that day.

At 6pm (Pacific Standard Time), which will be two o’clock in the morning here, he estimates that two percent of the world’s population will be “raptured” into Heaven.

Everybody else may go to hell. Or have to stick around for a rotten summer until God finally snuffs out the world’s existence on October 21.

This harbinger of doom is an 89-year-old former civil engineer who broadcasts daily on the Family Radio Network, which is funded entirely by its listeners and has assets of $120 million and owns 66 radio stations in the US and others around the world.

Which just goes to show the gullibility of Americans.

Mr Camping has said, “We’re not talking about a ball game, or a marriage, or graduating from college. We’re talking about the end of the world, a matter of being eternally dead, or being eternally alive, and it’s all coming to a head right now.”

A billboard campaign spreads the message with signs that proclaim: “Blow the trumpet, warn the people!”

Don’t believe him? He cites everything from earthquake and tsunami to gay pride as indications of impending doom.

“All the stealing, and the lying, and the wickedness and the sexual perversion that is going on in society is telling us something,” he says.

“So too is the gay pride movement. It was sent by God as a sign of the end.”

So there, it must be true.

Mr Camping does not believe in evolution and has predicted the end of the world before. He was left with a red face when apocalypse now failed to happen on September 6, 1994, but his belief and his following has remained undiminished.

His latest prediction is based on bible study and mathematics. And the amazing gullibility of his followers.

Me? I’ll certainly be prepared. I’ll buy a new umbrella for summer.