End of Days

At two minutes to midnight yesterday, July 29th 2016, I reached out across the bed and gave my wife a cuddle.

She was fast asleep but I thought that with the Apocalypse, the end of the world, the end of days imminent at midnight it would be nice to go out in an embrace with a loved one.

I need not have worried because after dozing off in the snuggled up position I awoke to the usual 6am alarm in full realisation that me and the other billions of global inhabitants were alive and in various states of wellness.

My initial and very real fears were prompted by various media reports that certain Religious Sects and Doomsayers had predicted that friday the 29th July, just gone would be the last for our planet.

It was not a vague premonition.

"You Tubers" had viewed, in their millions, a number of graphically illustrated and rather mechanically voice dubbed commentaries of Scripture and Text backed justifications for the event.

There have of course been many similar key dates for planetary eradication and in my own lifetime I can recall loonies and fundamentalists walking around with sandwich boards announcing "The End is Nigh". In my teenage years there was the very real threat of nuclear confrontation between the Superpowers.

In just the last 20 years we have had the prospect of the Millenium Bug, the 2009 financial meltdown, a 2011 Rapture, the 2012 Mayan and 2015 e-bible fellowship apocalypse's (or is it apocalypti) huge cyber threats, Ebola and Zika viruses and then yesterday's suggestion by End Times Prophecies.

So, such predictions are nothing new and even farther back in history famous personages have put forward their own arguments for Armageddon. Nostradamus opted for 2012 although this is now thought to be a mistake and 2023 is more likely. At least that gives a bit more time to plan ahead and stock up the bunker.

Martin Luther predicted no later than 1600. Christopher Columbus in his lesser known incarnation as an author saw no later than 1656. Even the Yorkshire, England based mystic Mother Shipton had a go and in her book published in 1862 she predicted that the world would end in 1861.

The most recent scaremongering has been brought about by a supposed "Polar Flip" or a change in the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field seen by some online theorists to be a catalyst for global earthquakes and a rolling cloud to engulf and destroy all in its wake.

This phenomena of a shift in the magnetic field has been researched as happening every 200,000 to 300,000 years although the people who know about such things, NASA, state that the last reversal was in fact more than 600,000 years ago. That post dates this as the cause of the cataclysmic events that did for the dinosaurs but has not swayed the Dooms-dayers in citing it as summoning global destruction.

NASA base their opinion on geological and fossil records from past magnetic polarity changes which did not show anything like a dramatic sequence of events.

So, waking up this morning next to my wife, still asleep, and making my way to the local shop to buy a newspaper and waffles seemed an idyllic way to start a new day and era.

However, who is to say that  I was just dreaming. I may have been incinerated, as predicted, at midnight and it was just my notional spirit wandering aimlessly in the scorched landscape in search of a distant memory of the Tesco Express Supermarket at the end of what used to be my street, my city, my country.....................the world.