WITH YOUR LEAVE, I’ll once again postpone continuing the 2010 11-Plus Exam review, which I began two Mondays ago in sympathy with the children of Barbados, who faced the real thing on May 3.
I’m not dodging the 11-Plus – indeed, I’m relying on my English marks to compensate for my poor maths and lift me from Garrison to Harrison – it’s just that I found out the world would end last Saturday – yes, last Saturday, May 21. The world ended then, as you no doubt remember – and God knows I wouldn’t want to be out of both The Rapture and the vogue.
The 89-year-old evangelical preacher Rev. Harold Camping made the BBC news last Friday with his confident prediction that the world would have begun to end last Saturday morning, starting with a literally earth-shattering earthquake. I think he even pinpointed the precise moment of the start of the end times to 6 a.m., local time, in New Zealand; but that could have been another crackpot.
The start of the end of the world last Saturday morning would be immediately followed, promised Rev. Camping, by what some Christian sects/cults call The Rapture – the literal physical ascension of believers’ bodies directly to Heaven (which, for some gravity- and logic-defying reason, is universally accepted as being above us somewhere, so that all saved ones need must float up into the air, like sacred helium balloons, with smiley faces painted on them).
The Rapture happened on Saturday, as you no doubt all remember, having seen all those Bajan members of the 200 million chosen drift away from across the table from you in KFC or while buying Lotto tickets in Broad Street. (The Rapture simply could not have happened and not one Bajan make the cut; indeed, you would expect the first 250K to have names like Haynes, Braithwaite and Cumberbatch.)
Rev. Camping was quite sure the end of the world would happen on Saturday, but I’m not sure his geography is as strong as his faith. With the International dateline turning 6 a.m. Saturday, New Zealand time, into 2 p.m. Friday, many of us sinners may have died before we could even have got to the bank.
And if God ran only a little late in celestial/godly terms, say until after lunch in New Zealand, there is even a possibility that Bajans began floating into the air on Friday night; which would surely have thrown the most enthusiastic of local soca singers for a loop, if people in St Lawrence Gap appeared to be quite literally obeying His injunction to jump “Higher! Higher! Higher!”
Of course, if you’re reading this, the only possible explanation for your continued delusion that the world did not end is (1) you failed to see The Rapture because God decided to do a kind of private or soft-opening Rapture; and (2) you are one of the sinners who will suffer greater hardship and inconvenience, such as floods, pestilence and traffic jams, until the world comes to a complete end in October.
And the real miracle to me is people say I’m doing something wrong when I mock rubbish like this.
B.C. Pires believes there was a celestial typo and God really meant The Rupture. Email him at bc@caribsurf.com
