It's goodbye from me. And all of you

It seemed important to get this post up in a hurry, since I have it on good authority – well, authority anyway – that the end of times happens this evening. At 6:00, apparently, though of course we’re on British Summer Time here, so I assume we have an hour longer – I presume divine institutions, when organising events like raptures, would base themselves on Greenwich Mean Time when they prepare the schedule for England.

So, it’s goodbye to all my readers. To the small number of you who will be caught up in the rapture, and ascend naked to heaven to join the Lord and his Saints, I can only say congratulations and happy eternity. For the rest, well see you shortly, I suppose, and let’s hope things don’t turn out quite as vile as we've been led to believe.

The authority on which I’m basing my plans for the rest of the day (the rest of time, actually) is of course the Bible, but transmitted via the Reverend Harold Camping of California (natch). At the cost of seeming churlish, I have to point out that he did previously predict the end of times for September 1994, which is perhaps a good reason for marginally downgrading the credit due to his forecast for tonight. Time to take a leaf out of the credit ratings agencies’ books – let’s downgrade Camping from triple-A to A. I reckon that’s about as reliable and rigorous a downgrading as the ratings agencies generally manage.

The biggest problem with Camping’s prophesy, though, isn’t the fact that he’s been wrong before, it’s his name. However seriously you might want to take his pronouncements, it’s really hard, isn’t it, with a name like that? It just kicks off far too many unfortunate trains of thought.

• For instance, I keep wanting to ask what he’ll do at the end of the world – fold his tent and steal away?
• Is Camping blessed with second site?
• Does he have the support of enough strong guys?
• Should we congratulate him on driving a peg so firmly into the ground?
• Might the police suspect him of prophesying within tent?

Camping out with the bible

That kind of thing introduces an unfortunate note of levity. Obviously, if he’d been called Tiresias or Isaiah, we might be able to take him much more seriously. And then I might have spent the next few hours cancelling any arrangements for the evening and preparing myself to meet my maker (not, I suspect, an occasion from which either of us could hope to gain very much, as a headmaster once told me when I was eleven).

And I certainly wouldn’t already be planning my first post-rapture blog post.