Apocalypse now? Actually I'm free next Thursday

Apparently the world is going to end on 12 December 2012. Or it may be 21 December 2012, presumably making the whole event a nine days' wonder. Assuming that total global catastrophe is indeed imminent, you may ask yourself what, if anything, you can do about it.

I am momentarily reminded of that legendary Home Office publication Protect and Survive, which advised what to do in the event of a nuclear holocaust. As I recall, you had to hide under the kitchen table, shut your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and count to 23,752,232,671,459 . . . by which time it was safe to come out.

However, in this case it seems you have to head for Pic Bugarach (see pic), our friendly neighbourhood highest mountain. According to an increasing number of esoteric types (or, if you prefer it, loons . . .), there are oodles of arguably amiable aliens living in a special chamber under the peak, who will leg it in their spaceship at the first sign of Armageddon.

Now, if you are very good, and mummy and daddy let you stay up late to watch the End of the World Show, there is a just a chance that the legendary Zargatrons of Planet Thargs will whisk you off to safety, somewhere the other side of Alpha Centauri.

Personally, I can't help feeling that there is rather a rash assumption here; that we are talking about a partial Armageddon, involving the mere termination of Planet Earth, rather than a total Armageddon, which would wipe out the entire Universe, including Planet Thargs.

How can we tell? Sometimes this worries me. Be that as it may, Pic Bugarach has a lot of cred in the Suitably Weird Places To Escape Armageddon Stakes. For a start its rocks are upside-down, with the new ones underneath the old ones - definitely a geological curved ball, as I understand it.

It looks strange too, as if some passing Zargatron had emptied a large bowl of grey custard over it, and let all the drips set solid. Seemingly, Jules Verne gained inspiration there for Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Steven Spielberg for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Nostradamus himself is reputed to have experienced cosmic thrills on Pic Bugarach.

Monsieur le Maire de Bugarach, the nearby modest village of 189 peaceable and relatively normal souls, is understandably peest erf at the prospect of being overrun by anything up to up 10,000 loons. Usually, the only genuinely bizarre thing about Bugarach is the way that all on-coming drivers whiz round the many blind bends, on the wrong side of the road. Too much waccy baccy, methinks.

However, ringside seats for Dec 2012 are already being sold on the net. Monsieur le Maire wants the army on the alert to deal with any such inundation by crétins cosmiques, and I can't say that I blame him.

We of Les Malfonctionnaires take a more robust, dare I say commercial, view: We'd just love to play the End of the World gig, and the resulting album, Almost Live, could be a massive hit. All real rock stars make shedloads more money when they're dead. It would be nicer to be a live millionaire than a dead legend but you can't have everything. I suppose you just have to lie back and think of posterity.

I've just run through some possibilities for the set list:

*Ain't No Mountain High Enough - Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell

* Don't Believe A Word - Thin Lizzy

* We Gotta Get Out of This Place - The Animals

*Fly Me To The Moon - Frank Sinatra

*Fireball, Space Truckin' - Deep Purple

* Gimme Shelter, Get Off My Cloud - The Rolling Stones

* Life on Mars - David Bowie

* Close to the Edge - Yes

* My Apocalypse - Metallica

* Armageddon It - Def Leppard

* Fool on the Hill, The End - The Beatles

* The End - The Doors

* Until the End of the World - U2

* End of the World - The Carpenters

Should the show unfortunately Keep On Running (Spencer Davis), then it has to be The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again