11.12am came... and went. Oh well, it's not the end of the world - The Independent

But as 11.12 am on the last day of the Long Count Mayan calendar came and went – and all the predictions of collapse, mayhem, kaboooooms and extinction disappeared down the cosmic pan – it was all a bit lame.

"Screeching gargoyles fly over the Maas river of blood!" came one excited message. But it was a lonely one, far outnumbered by those who thought it a great joke to pretend to be a solitary survivor, seeking out others. A new online dating gambit perhaps?

Over in Zhejiang Province, south of Shanghai, several wealthy Chinese were left gazing at the three-ton, radiation-proof, spherical "Atlantis pods" in which they had each sunk £500,000, wondering what to do with them now.

China, in fact, offered the ripest manifestations of Doomsday folly. The Church of Almighty God, a pseudo-Christian outfit founded in 1989 which claims that a Chinese woman is the reincarnation of Christ, succeeded in signing up thousands of new members with its end-of-the-world predictions, persuading them to give up all their worldly goods. But as the deadline came and went, Chinese authorities arrested dozens of cult members and raided its offices.

As nothing happened at 11.12 there was no catharsis, except for the hapless inhabitants of Bugarach in south-west France. In recent days they had found their population of 200 doubled by international media crews bent on filming New Agers streaming towards the village's mountain that is supposed to contain a coven of aliens and thus to be spared come the End of Things.

But there were no streaming New Agers, the survivalists were limited and the mountain was blocked off by mounted policemen. So the TV crews had to make do with filming a few locals dressed up as extra-terrestrials, another couple who had hiked all the way from Lille wrapped in tinfoil, and a chap playing panpipes.

Once the globe had failed to do whatever people were expecting, Bugarach was able to heave a sigh of baffled relief and get back to normality.

Of course, that would be premature. Even the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, conceded that it was "inevitable" that the world would end, though he placed that event four billion years in the future, by which time somebody else will be in power. His prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, was more cautious, saying only, "I don't believe in the end of the world. At least, not this year."

In our Barnum and Bailey world, the Mayan Armageddon was more than anything else a brilliant if fleeting business opportunity. Every