On Saturday 12th September 1981, the Earth succumbed to firey nuclear armageddon. I know, because I was there and it wasn't as bad as most people think.Frankly - and looking back three decades into this desolate nuclear winter - it's all been a bit of an embarrassment, what with the world ending, nobody actually noticing, and civilisation going on much as before. You know how these things happen - big hair and shoulder pads all came along at once and everybody got distracted.
As regular readers may remember from a near identical post five years ago, I was fifteen years old and at an airshow at RAF Abingdon on that fateful day, watching the combined might of NATO's air forces celebrating Battle of Britain Day instead of motoring over the Berlin Wall and giving those Warsaw Pact curs a damn good thrashing in the four minutes between the declaration of war and the wiping out of humanity, as foretold in The Prophecy. As the Four Horsemen - Death, War, Famine and Mark Thatcher - road out, I was sitting in the back of a hired Ford Transit van, eating a packed lunch my mum had done for me. A photograph existed, browned at the edges by the flames of the nuclear nightmare.
September 12th ticked over to September 13th, and we all felt a little stupid, not least my friend Richard, who had actual money riding on a bet that the world was going to end. I, callow and easily-impressionable youth that I was, TOOK THAT BET, and had bought entirely into the whole End of the World business, having seen a television programme stating plainly that the world was due to end by the end of 1981. As prophets and prophecies go, I now know for a fact that Frank Bough and Nationwide might not have been up there with Nostradamus. Hindsight, eh?
Now, thirty years on, I ask: Have we learned from the past? And I am sad to say that it has not. Sadly, the world got its nuts trapped in a vice and ended AGAIN three weeks ago in a cloud of vapour that would have had even the crappiest of End Times preachers punching the air with delight, if there had been any actual air left to punch. A belligerent China rushed to North Korea's defence, and a limited nuclear exchange suddenly became a superpower confrontation with all-too-predictable results. Everything gone. Humanity. Civilisation. Every single life form on the face of the planet, even the single-cell amoeba and the celebrities.
And once again, no-one noticed. Not a soul. And the reason (as foretold in the prophecy): JEDWARD IN THE BIG BROTHER HOUSE
Third time's the charm, eh? See you all in five years.
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