Having A Nice Doomsday

So – according to Harold Camping and his Apocalypse-junkies, the world ends today. Are we having fun yet?

Personally, I was up at the crack of urgghh (and so, by appalling default, was d – sorry honey!), schlepping to Nottingham for what it’s easiest simply to call ‘a work thing’.

My boss, Peter, picked me up in his car from Green Park station, just by the Ritz, and I managed to grab a bucketful of my decaff pointlessness of choice just before he arrived.

We stopped off for breakfast at a service station somewhere on the M1, and two slices of toast and a large decaff (yes, a second one) cost me over a fiver. How are we enjoying the Chronic Recession, by the way?

When it arrived, I almost baulked. I mean, I’m a large coffee drinker by nature and choice, but this thing needed two handles…which as far as I’m concerned makes it a bowl of coffee…Still…I occasionally like a challenge, so I downed it, and felt absolutely no different, except for the pressing need to pee.

When we got to Nottingham, Peter and I ended up trying to get into one of those hip new buildings that look like the love-child of a Lego set and a Rubik cube. The so-called ‘automatic’ doors clicked and clacked and did precisely buggerall. We waved at the Reception desk.

An enormous teddy in the shape of a polar bear was sitting behind the desk. Was this a Sign of the Apocalypse, we wondered?

Eventually, we hijacked a hapless wandering bloke by making kind, supplicating eyes at him through the sealed doors. He wandered in our direction, and waved his swipe card. The doors sprang open and nearly flattened us against the walls. I eyed the radically-sprung things nastily as we passed on through.

Once there, it was business as usual…or rather, business as is usual if you’ve been up since 5.30. I grunted here and there, and can only hope I didn’t snore during the presentations we were there to hear. I did yawn, coffily, in the face of an innovation award winner, but he seemed too excited by his win to take offence, thankfully. One of the guys who ran the event did tell me the story of a mutual friend though, who at the end of long and busy meetings orders a “decaff double espresso”.

Ahhhhhhh…somehow, it feels good to hear a story like that – presumably, pointlessness, like misery and exhaustion, loves company.

Schlepped back to London on a train on my own, as Peter, fairly sensibly, wanted nothing to do with London traffic, and as I write this, I’m sitting in Starbucks in Islington, with another large decaff latte, waiting to go our for dinner with d.

So – my doomsday tastes of froth and pointlessness, but has nevertheless been generally positive. How’s yours going? Moon turned to blood yet? Sun the colour of sackcloth and ashes? (Or is it the other way around…? Note to self: upload the Bible to the Kindle when I get home, just for a laugh). Are the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding yet?

Yes, really, there are five – War, Famine, Pestilence, Death and Domino’s Pizza. I’m…fairly sure. (Note to self: seriously, upload the Bible to the Kindle when I get home…)

Tomorrow of course, I turn forty (so I daresay lots of people would have welcomed the world ending the day before…but not me, I’m looking forward to forty; if nothing else it’ll be a license to start acting childishly). We’re doing something in the morning, which I think I know, but then, knowing my beloved, you can never be entirely sure. Either way, I intend to dress hugely inappropriately for my age, and run around like an 8-year-old, just to prove to the world in general and myself in particular that I still can.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that I can’t – like the time I went to see the movie Hostel, just to prove to myself that I could still watch horror movies like I did as a teenager…only to discover I really couldn’t, and get stopped and searched under Anti-Terrorism laws for ‘excessive blank-eyed dithering with no clear intention to proceed,’ as d rather excellently puts it.

But I’m gonna try, dammit! Gonna try to run around like an 8-year-old, I mean. I have a feeling my forties are gonna be a decade of relative fearlessness, of trying to do stuff, rather than thinking about all the reasons why doing stuff is impossible, or unlikely, or looks silly. I think it’s going to be the beginning (or a new beginning, more accurately) of my Purple Period (y’know the poem? “When I am old, I shall wear purple…”). Here’s to being mad and possible and blazing a demented, productive trail.

Assuming we all survive the night of course. Oh, on which subject, d’s just come in from the candy store next door. Apparently you can now get white chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

If that’s not a Sign of the Apocalypse, I don’t know what is…

Hmm...anyone fancy a coffee?