On this day to end all days...

...apparently(!), here's what's been on my mind in the planet's final moments.

Starting with a serious note, it seems that the latest gun atrocity in the States has been sufficiently shocking that, finally, there may be some real debate on gun control. The President is openly supporting a ban on assault weapons which, while hardly a cure-all, would at least be a start and suggest the conversation was beginning to happen. Let's hope some small good comes out of what has been an unimaginable horror for those of us detached from it.

But turning to the forthcoming apocalypse (as I write there are just a couple of hours to go). It seems there are now two mountain redoubts built by aliens to shield the believer from the end - one in Serbia, one in France. The small French village at the foot of one of them has had so many visitors (over 10,000!) that they've had to seal the area off and the Mayor had called for people not to go there. This raises questions:

How are people supposed to get into the hideout once they get there? How does one enter a mountain? Is there a door? Some sign, invisible to those of us who think these poor souls are deluded nincompoops, pointing the way?

What do they think they'd emerge into? I've read tales of the end coming about in various ways, from another planet hitting us, through rapture to zombie apocalypse (which plenty of people seem positively itching to happen). What exactly do those, assuming they'd got in, think there'd be left to come out to? Would you even want to?

Anyway. I was thinking about all this in the Post Office queue the other day, as you do. I was waiting to collect a parcel that they'd been unable to deliver, and it being near Christmas - why are people bothering? The world's going to blow up. - there was a bit of a wait. So I perused the various posters etc., adorning the walls. One of them, helpfully, informed one that the little cubby-hole from which undelivered parcels could be collected would be open extra days and longer hours in the build-up to the festive period, in order that people could 'collect there parcels' (sic).

This at the Post Office. The very deliverer, at least until recently, of the written word no less. Makes me wish I were sealed in a mountain sometimes, it does - fair gives me the shivers.

Happy apocalypse, all.