It wouldn’t matter if all the bees died

But don’t worry, says Rod Liddle, they’re not going to. The bee holocaust myth is just another example of our strange yearning for catastrophe

The world is going to end in 2012, apparently — hopefully just before the start of the Olympic Games. Armageddon may come about as a consequence of those monkeys firing up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they have al-Qa’eda operatives attempting to create black holes which will swallow the earth whole, or reduce it to the size of an extremely dense tennis ball.

Imagine seven billion of us trying to stand on a tennis ball. You just hope personal hygiene standards won’t be sacrificed. Or perhaps it will be giant solar flares frazzling the earth, or a sudden reversal of the earth’s magnetic field which will see us cooked like cheap burgers in a microwave oven. How do we know this? Apparently the Mayans predicted it. They’ll look pretty stupid if they were wrong, the Mayans. Nostradamus predicted it too and so, of course, did the Bible. My mother-in-law is a born-again Christian who belongs to an obscure sect which believes the world will end in October 2017 (meaning we have to endure two more Olympic Games, plus the accompanying paralympics). On that date she and a few other people are going to be taken up to heaven for a bloody good party — slap-up meal, dance band, personal address by Christ, goody bag — while the rest of us, especially the Muslims, are consumed by fire. One way or another we are destined to perish very soon. There’s a film out soon called 2012 which will explain it all, if you’re interested.