Wading ankle-deep through end times

PL on the coming rapture and another bad day for cricket with India and Pakistan sullying the game's spirit

I’m not on TikTok, preferring rather to restrict my social media input and output to Musk’s shitpub — with a bit of time in the Instagram club lounge on the side — so I’d missed the news that the world ends Tuesday. Or Wednesday.

Fair enough. If we’re to be completely honest, this random bloom of ours does seem to be tracking from bad to worse, but it seems a bit cruel of whoever to cut this Putricia off at the roots with the promise of an Ashes summer ahead.

I hope the news doesn’t alarm you, and I’ve done a smattering of research to help out anyone who hasn’t been keeping up. (For some reason, and possibly because the Murdochs are said to be kicking the social media company’s tyres, The Rapture, seems to be a TikTok exclusive event.) It’s too late to get the above roof arrangement installed, but apparently, it’s advisable not to cling to anything if you are among those being returned to heaven. It’s also too late to sell your car, as many are ahead of The Rapture, which is timed to coincide with the Feast of Trumpets or Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year). You’re not going to need that old Rav4 up there, anyway, I figure God will have low-emission glowing-white hybrid jobbies with personalised number plates for those of you who’ve bent the correct knee and sung the right songs. Free charging and parking bays for all of god’s chosen!

While we’re on End Times, there’s talk that Charlie Kirk’s memorial in America today is the biggest Christian prayer meeting in history. With all due respect, I think Billy Graham’s 1959 Grand Final of Faith at the MCG, with its estimated crowd of somewhere between 130,000 and 149,000, still holds some claim to fame. And, if you ever want to see a big faith gathering, I’ll point you toward the Hindu’s Kumbh Mela.

I never got to a Kumbh Mela in my Indian days, but a fellow traveller told me how he resolved that the ritual bathing in the Ganges was just the sort of event for him to shed his troubled past and start a new life. The Italian backpacker travelled to Hardwar and went straight to the river where he stripped himself naked, jumped in and participated in the puja rituals. Emerging from the sacred river, he discovered that he’d been freed from material constraints of his past. His money, his clothes, his passport and his shoes were all gone. To give the guy his due, he found the whole incident hilarious. Here he was, again, as he said, completely naked and owning nothing, just like when he was born.

On Fox News right now, some bloke is claiming Charlie Kirk is a “true Christian martyr” and his death a “spiritual awakening”. Good to see that Trump has attempted to put a positive spin on the moment by announcing at the memorial that RFK jr has found “an answer to autism”.

I was up during the night watching India play Pakistan in their second Asia Cup match. The first, with all its political gesturing and poor sportsmanship, left a bad taste in the mouth. The second is further confirmation that this is a(nother) sorry shit-show from which we all emerge poorer.