Staying alive despite the doomsday merchants

I’M WRITING this a week ahead of time because the elves that make the newspaper magically appear every morning are having a few days off at Christmas, so by the time you read this you may already be dead.

Unless, of course, you are reading while clinging alone to a solitary rock in an unrecognisable post-apocalyptic landscape of waterlogged chaos and rubble, in which case I commend you for getting your hands on a copy of the paper and taking time out for a nice sit down in the midst of your fight for survival. It can’t be easy being the last person alive after the world has ended.

I refer, obviously, to the Mayan prophecy, the one that everyone has been saying for years is the definitive date for our world to cease existing. If you have a strong sensation of actually reading this, and can physically feel the newspaper in your hands, or can see the words in front of you on your iPad, it can only mean one of three things: (1) you are the sole survivor, in which case, congratulations, and happy looting (2) there is an afterlife after all, with newspapers on sale there, or (3) the Mayans were full of it.

Based on past end of the world outcomes, my money is on (3). There have been several in recent memory, with predictions from the mighty Nostradamus to the Heavens Gate guy who persuaded his 39 followers to kill themselves in 1997 prior to the arrival of aliens coming to visit after the Hale Bopp comet. They never came, as anyone with a decent telescope could have pre-confirmed.

Nostradamus we took slightly more seriously, until the world continued to turn after the solar eclipse in August 1999. Then there was the Y2K prediction, that the Millennium Bug would make all the world’s computers crash and we would revert back to the Stone Age as planes fell from the skies and the tills stopped working at Tesco. That didn’t happen either.

I know this because I was sitting on a beach on both those dates, reckoning that this would be the optimum place to witness the end, rather than, say, hiding in a wardrobe. All that happened during the 1999 solar eclipse was that I went temporarily blind from staring at it; on Millennium Eve, on a remote uninhabited beach in India, the only way I knew the world hadn’t ended was when a plane flew overhead a few hours after midnight. Life carried on.

It must be infuriating for those religious maniacs when their gleeful assurances of our mass smiting doesn’t happen. The American evangelist Pat Robertson was convinced it was all over 30 years ago: “I guarantee you by the end of 1982 there is going to be judgement on the world.” Still. This is the same guy who said feminism “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Happy New Year. Stay alive.