Will The World End In 2012? Probably Not

Will Harris looks forward to New Year’s Eve 2012

“You’re not giving up on women,” I say to H; “you’re just impatient.” Today is New Year’s Eve; what’s left of it anyway. It is also H’s birthday, a confluence she has long despised and can only reconcile by getting twice as pissed as everyone else, hours in advance of anyone else.

“Waddyou mean?” H regards me through the fumes of her mulled cider. Her head is weaving behind her bifocals, and all of this combines to give her the unmistakeable air of a shamanic inuit.

“It’s like…” I pause. How to put this? “OK, this is totally hackneyed, but it’s true that you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your… well, princess in your case. I suppose.”

“Nono.” H shakes her head. “Not princess. Frogs is prince. Princess’ princess is peas.”
“OK, you’ll have to eat a lot of peas then.”
“Yes, eat lots of peas, scale tall pile of mattresses, end up in bed with a beast? Ooh! That’s where‘m going wrong!”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t like peas.”

“Of course this is all nonsense. The world will not end and I will enter my 30s”

It is around now I realise that our fairytale metaphor is a long way off a happy ending, and that the entire conversation is best left in 2011, along with Kim Jong-Il and the News of the World. As the crowd counts down to Big Ben’s bongs, and H sees in yet another New Year face down on a pile of coats in the corner, I can’t help but wonder where the next twelve months will take us. 2012 is the year – according to generations of Mesoamerican scholars and one very shaky John Cusack movie – when the Long Count calendar used by the ancient Mayan Empire runs out of dates. And with no Mayans around to ask what happens next (thanks, syphilitic conquistadors, thanks a lot!), fruitcakes everywhere have seized on the fact as an augur of doom: lights out, game over. December 2012, they say, will be nothing short of the end of the world.

That the end of days has been scheduled in for around the same time as my 30th birthday has come as no surprise. Not yet able to compute that the time has come to leave my cherished 20s behind, at this stage it actually seems a far more likely scenario that we’ll all end the year obliterated by the planet Nibiru. Mind you, I won’t have to worry about being 30 and still not having a mortgage, on account of every house on Earth will have been neatly vaporised and we’ll all be dead anyway. Hooray!
Of course this is all nonsense. The world will not end, and I will enter my 30s, and H’s birthday will continue to be overshadowed by New Year’s Eve, and maybe, just maybe we’ll all live happily ever after. Happy New Year!