Saturday 22nd December

If you are still reading this, which I am certain you will be, then yet another loony prophecy will have been disproved.  And there have been so many haven’t there, that we don’t take them seriously anymore.  But why do people still insist on believing in prophecies and seeing into the future?  The future as everyone knows is simply unknowable, being the result of many individual actions and global and planetary and galactic and universal forces we are barely beginning to comprehend.  What we might be fairly certain of is that won’t be happening soon – at least not before Christmas.  But the gullibility of otherwise rational intelligent people never ceases to amaze me.  I actually lived through the nearest we came to the end of the world back in 1962 when Kruschev blinked and a nuclear war was averted, though I was more interested in how ‘Love Me Do’ was doing in the charts at the time.

The end of the world of course happens every minute of every day for somebody, and it will be my turn too one day.  If you accept that our understanding of the world is encapsulated in our own comprehension; that is within each individual person’s functioning brain.  Despite what is written down as received wisdom each of us has our own idea of the world, which may be limited to a small horizon where our friends and family live or may encompass continents and even bits of the wider cosmos which we may think we understand, at least for a while. But that knowledge is different for each one of us, in fact a different understanding of the world exists within each one of us, yes, even inside Britney Spears brain too.  And as we die off so one understanding, one interpretation of the world dies each time.  And so the World Ends for each of us as the last synapse ceases to transmit its tiny electric charge.  Luckily it may just be possible that the World also exists outside my own consciousness and the rest of you will carry on after my demise – but I wouldn’t bet on it.