Poor old Harold Camping.
He was so certain, so determined that Saturday was the day.
The final reckoning. The end of the world.
Of course, at age 89 you could just about put a dollar on any given day being your personal day of reckoning.
But no, Harold thought the game was up for
all of us.
And, in the end, the Rapture proved to be nothing more than fodder for headline writers (Apocalypse not right now, World refuses to end) and smug sceptics.
And no one made more of a meal of the failed Second Coming than Twitterers, who were tweeting End Times one-liners at a rate of a several hundred a second. (One urged readers to console disappointed believers with "Cheer up, it's not the end of the world".)
But then, taking a walk through Ahuriri on a glorious post-apocalyptic morning, I wondered whether Mr Camping was on to something after all.
Perhaps a small, localised rapture had occurred during the night.
Because all along West Quay were signs that dozens of people had been snatched away in the midst of enjoying a quiet drink, leaving their shattered bottles and crushed cans strewn across the road.
Elsewhere, believers eating final meals of takeaways were called to the heavens mid-bite, dropping their wrappings and rubbish where they stood.
And over here, someone apparently shocked by the sight of people being Rapturised (that's possibly not a real word) had thrown up all over the footpath.
Or perhaps it was just that people who would ordinarily put their bottles and wrappers in the bin thought, hey, the world's ending. Why bother?
I'm sure I don't need to point out that I'm being facetious. But it would be nice to think that the rubbish and chaos left behind on Sunday morning, that stepping over vomit to get to brunch, was something out of the ordinary. But, unfortunately, it was probably just the usual aftermath from a big-game Saturday night.
