Iam writing this column before the date on which the world is supposed to end, December 21, 2012. But the planned date of publication for this column is January 18, 2013. So, if you are reading it, then, yes, the world did not end. If you have been turned into cosmic dust, well, so has Engineering News, so no matter.

But this is the way I felt about the end of the world on December 21: the end of the world is scheduled on the Mayan calendar for 2112012. Nothing really matters if you have a sincere and truthful end of the world event.

The Mayan calendar came to the end of the ‘long count’ on the December 21 (the day after my mother’s birthday), and it is believed that the world may end the following day. Or perhaps not. We must not forget that the Western world used the Julian calendar until 1582, when we changed to the present Gregorian calendar, a process which required that we skip ten days in October 1582. So, the world may, in fact, end ten days after December 21, on New Year’s Eve, which makes a whole lot more sense than the day after my mother’s birthday. Naturally, there will be few who will not know, on New Year’s Day, the difference between a severe hangover and the end of the world. Boy, will they get a surprise.

I am quite keen to see how the world shuts down. I think we can be sure it is not going to just vanish in a cloud of smoke – more likely, the world as we know it will end. This can be quite a cheering prospect since it may well imply the elimination of a whole lot of very annoying things: queues in Woolworths, queues in banks, banks messing you around, dodgy tender awards to the hopelessly incompetent, ruling party politicians doing nothing of any use, people who legislate against dogs, people who do not legislate against cats, crème soda, vegans, Nigerian drug dealers, people who call themselves engineers but are not engineers, the delays of the law, mini taxi sound systems, developers who allow buildings to be built with no attention to acoustics . . . oh, the list is endless.

One assumes that some life will continue. Apart from eliminating the concept of ‘red data’ species, I would like to think that most of the birds of the air and creatures of the sea will continue on and, somewhere, a few humans will crawl out of bomb shelters to start a new civilisation. Actually, this is very frightening. For those of you who watch the TV series Doomsday Preppers, you will have to realise that people of the new world will be descendants of the sort of people who build bomb shelters and stock up on water, food supplies and Geiger counters on a routine basis – basically, the overweight/ near-anorexic and insane to various degrees. Worryingly, they will produce children who will have little choice but to marry their cousins – producing offspring who will become nations of people who are dumber than a box of rocks and who look as they were poured into their clothes and somebody forgot to say “when”. Much, in fact, like the standard South African politician.

I would like to know if our politicians are, in fact, making any preparations to survive the end of the world. One thinks not, since, with the end of the world, will go most of the taxpayers and thus there will be no public funds left to loot.

The politicians will, thus, have to survive by innate wit and intelligence, which, for a politician, is as rare as a skipping tortoise. On the other hand, I am fully prepared. With my two dogs at my feet, a few cases of wine in the office and my fly-fishing rods and kit, I am good to go. I can tie flies using dog hair and eat trout. Well, did the world end or not? Were the Mayans correct? Today, on December 21, I don’t know. See you on the other side.