Well son, where did it all go wrong . . . apocalyptically?

Now is the End, The End Of The World!

 . . . Er, it's not quite The Great Conflagration I've been expecting . . .

Which as any fule kno is from Beyond the Fringe, and which is pretty much where those in authority seem to have to been for the last week or two, given an embarrassing lack of apocalypsy. I suppose that's what you'd call it if you suffer from Apocalypse.

Personally, I think this partly down to LLMF or Lack of Loon Moral Fibre. If this this had been a Summer Solstice affair, we probably would have been inundated with thousands of new age Loons sitting up all night getting stoned, talking total bollocks, playing djembe drums incredibly badly, and finally nodding out after daybreak, having ascertained that the fengshuli thiswatche of the new rising sun was correctly aligned with the mystic hyperflume of its delta rays.

Don't understand? Don't worry, I just made it up. Bet it was hard to tell the difference though . . . As is it, I think Winter Solstices are more about curling up with a premature mince pie and a well-thumbed copy of The Mabinogion. Most of the Loons obviously thought so too.

They stayed at home in droves, leaving rain-soaked Bugarach, both mountain and village, to an army of journalists, and 150 Gendarmes with nothing better to do than rush around in their polished leather cavalry boots, in the hope of getting a leg over a fragrant hackette.

However that did mean they weren't around to nick the rest of us for speeding, which what they normally do most of the time. It's an ill wind . . .

In these straightened times for newspapers, you wonder who's going to cough up for this un-story: Yea I prophesy much smiting of expenses, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth will be loud thereof.

Still there's always a way round these problems. You just need a new angle. How about: Mayan calender bonanza - Britain wins 3,000 years more SHOPPING!

I have this recurrent evil thought that one day in a month or so, the Prefecture will suddenly wake up and send a bill for all this pointless kerfuffle to Monsieur le Maire de Bugarach, Jean-Pierre Delord. That should give him a nightmare or two. 

But for now, Authority seems even more barking than the Loons they were trying to protect from themselves. It's true that some sort of competent presence was necessary to prevent ill-equipped idiots from either falling off the mountain or becoming trapped in its caves.

However the Prefecture's decision to ban all live gigs in the area on the day after the world didn't end, in case it sparked an outbreak of après-Loondom, makes you wonder just who has been sampling the waccy-baccy. 

I kid you not: my mate Olivier's bar gig in Quillan has been annulé for that very reason. I honestly don't think he's likely to spark a mass suicide; he can actually sing . . .

Personally I spent the 21st putting up shelves for my mate Raymond's dear old mum, who has probably seen a real catastrophe or two in her 88 years, and makes the best cup of tea and a bickie in France. 

Certainly I could see no cogent reason to be outside on the kind of grim and ghastly day that makes Blaenau Ffestiniog look like paradise. Or maybe I just have no sense of occasion.

Armageddon - so why didn't it happen? My own theory is that the Famous Flat Sopranos of Deux Pics en Choeur Saved The World - for us, for our children, for our children's children, for posterity and of course Atonal Damnation. Well, why not? They destroyed the aliens with country and western music in Mars Attacks. If it's good enough for Tim Burton . . .

And actually our beloved Café de Fa came up with a cracking End of the World film night: Mars Attacks coupled with the French comedy classic La Soupe au Choux (Cabbage Soup), starring the late Louis de Funés, who used to be France's nearest thing to a Carry On star.

In the film, Monsieur de Funés makes contact with aliens by means of gigantic farts, generated by the aforementioned soup. Just about sums up the whole Bugarach experience . . .