The end of the world is nigh...

So, today was meant to be the Rapture, and as I sit here at 7.00 pm writing this, it doesn't look like the world is going to end after all. So we can all breath a sigh of relief and go about our business. Well almost, there's still a few hours left although it was meant to happen an hour ago. I didn't even know that the world was going to end until my daughter Holly mentioned it the other evening in passing. She didn't seem that bothered by the news, just another event in an eventful world - besides there was her hair to sort out ready for the weekend, because if the world was going to end she wasn't going to have messy hair for the occasion. Heaven forbid!

It made me think a little. When I was a kid it seemed like the world might really end at any moment. The Russians hated the Americans and the Americans hated them right back and we all knew that they had thousands on thousands of nuclear missiles pointing at each other and at any moment it could all kick off and that then we would all be toast and the world would be destroyed.

I vaguely remember, aged 5, the Cuban missile crisis. For a while there it looked as if the world might really be finished, and although it didn't, it came pretty close. From then on the end of the world was only just around the corner, ready to happen at any time, and I often thought that growing up in those uncertain days of what has come to be known as the 'Cold War' accounts in part for what seems to be my generations fatalistic approach to things, their acceptance that we are all helpless to do anything about anything really.

Or perhaps that's just me talking for myself. It might sound silly to young people today but living under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust did rather taint our lives back then. Hardly a day went by without somebody talking about the bomb - wanting to ban it, or news of another nuclear test out in the desert or on some far off pacific island, or warnings that we had moved from defcon four to defcon three and that the Doomsday clock was now set at three minutes to midnight.

It seemed that when I was growing up nuclear war was imminent pretty much all of the time. It's different today. Oh, there are still wars and the threat of terrorism seems ever present, but I don't think we live waiting for the world to end with the press of a single button any longer and I truly believe that for the forty years or so after the second world war ended, up until the collapse of the USSR, we really did expect the world to end at any moment. It may not be a safer world, and the world still might end at any moment, but if it does it'll be because of a comet or a plague, maybe divine intervention even. But it won't be because somebody decides to push a button in Moscow or Washington - or at least I hope not.