A Very British Apocalypse
Perhaps, when The End eventually comes, we’ll all be sat round our living rooms feeling terribly disappointed with the whole thing. The Apocalypse will receive an aggregated score of B- on The AV Club. AA Gill will variously describe impending doom as ‘a spoilt broth’, ‘an over-egged pudding’, ‘all cock and no balls’. In his final column - End Of All Humanity? Wake Me Up When It’s Over — Richard Littlejohn will lament that, compared to his beloved Proms, the build-up simply lacks in ‘British pomp and circumstance’. Elsewhere, Jools Holland’s Doomsday Hootenanny will fail to attract any big name guests, and mass-extinction will be greeted only by boogie-woogie piano.
Your family have been watching Dad’s Army. It’s the one where Jones mistakes a £500 package for a pound of sausages. You take the remote and put BBC1 on. Paul McCartney and Brian May are stood back-to-back on top of Buckingham Palace, the final bars of Hey Jude echoing into eternity as a fireball engulfs them. Jake Humphrey calls it a ‘phenomenal spectacle.’ On ITV the This Morning crew gather together for one final selfie. The scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen shows that #Doomsbae is trending. You grumble under your breath as your sister grabs you for a photo. “Don’t tag me in that”, you say.
Later, you gather in the pub with a handful of your old schoolmates, but no one has much to say. You listlessly scroll through Twitter with your phone hidden under the table. 13 Times Kenan and Kel Called Bullshit On The Arab Spring. 17 Surprising Health Benefits of Phosphate Gas. A stolen Last Supper joke from 2013 has been reposted by LadBible. Miranda Keeling is pretending to overhear a conversation between two cockroaches. Great British Problems urge everyone to Keep Calm and Put The Kettle On. Your mate gets some decent numbers after cropping a reaction shot of George Osborne’s crybaby face next to a mushroom cloud. For a moment you hover between the ‘Like’ and the ‘Retweet’ button, before deciding on neither. You put your phone in your pocket and sip your beer.
By evening, the heat from the cosmic inferno turns the sky a sickening orange. Your windows seem to warp in their frame, and the roar overhead is constant and deafening. You’ve stopped by the supermarket, limited edition End Of The World Minions mugs are everywhere. You take some earplugs from the shelf and get your phone back out. Annoyingly, lots of people have overlaid their Facebook profile with a picture of God. Some people take issue with the image, others make jokes about it. Others post twelve-part tweets explaining that it’s actually very serious indeed. You see a bad opinion and screenshot it, sending it to a friend with a crying-laughing emoji. She replies with seven more crying-laughing emojis and a flamenco dancer in red dress emoji. You smile. In the supermarket you can no longer hear yourself think. You pull your jacket over your head and run to your car, where shards of red hot metal melt neat circular holes right through the glass. As the heat and the sound and the fury from above draw inexorably closer, you notice that Ricky Gervais has posted a picture of himself with his cat’s paw in his mouth. The picture is captioned ‘Goodbye my best friend.’ You go to share this ironically, before pausing to worry whether some people might think you meant it seriously. You laugh under your breath and put your phone on the seat. You go to turn on the ignition, but before your hand reaches the key you start to wonder — what exactly is it about those Facebook profile pictures that’s making you so annoyed?
The sky is a blinding melee of pink and white.
You begin to feel frustrated.
You open your notes and start drafting a Facebook status:
I think the problem with these images is that they immediately presuppose an in ‘us-vs-them’ narrative on what should really be considered as a symbol of Unity. In the face of imminent extinction, this gatekeeping of salvation feels like a somewhat reductive theological position to adopt. This shouldn't be what The Apocalypse is all about. If you think that changing your profile picture makes a difference then by all means go ahead and do it — but I’ll be keeping mine as it is. x
As you pull away from the car park you notice your tyres sticking to the melting asphalt below. A shroud of suffocating black descends. Your phone buzzes. And again. You try to ignore the dopamine rush that awaits you but it proves too difficult. Eventually you sit alone in your driveway, methodically pointing out why some replies to your status are religiously hyper-sensitive, whilst others are ignoring the clear neo-liberal agenda in the marketing push for Doomsday. In your frustration you make a spelling mistake. You go back to correct it but before you can press send a tremendous flash of light cuts through the sky. You fumble for your iPhone camera but there is no time left. The unspeakable second passes. Nothing besides remains. Britain is a scorched wasteland.
Hours. Days. Weeks pass. From beneath the ashen remains comes the unmistakeable chirrup of a Twitter notification. It’s Dave Schneider. He’s got a joke for you. It’s David Cameron dressed like a butler. But wait — he’s riding an atomic bomb. And, and, wait, the atomic bomb, the atomic bomb resembles a pig. But there is no one left. Viral content no longer exists. Our nearest neighbours shake their heads in disappointment. ‘It’s been’ they write, ‘a very British apocalypse.’
