Q. Is the world going to end on August 11th?
A. Maybe. But then again, maybe not. On the date in question, we'll be getting a bit of a dress rehearsal for the millennium itself so it will be instructive to keep a "nutter watch" on what happens.
To many people it's just complete coincidence that a dusted-off quote from our friend Nostradamus happens to almost coincide with a spectacular total solar eclipse due for the morning of Wednesday, August 11th, across large swathes of the northern hemisphere.
The Nostradamus quote, and it is quite specific, has it that "In 1999, in the seventh month, from the sky will come a great King of Terror" (Quatrain X, 72).
The fact that he's a good month out (and has been wrong about almost everything else) doesn't seem to matter to "idiosyncratic" people like the fashion designer Paco Rabanne who, when he's not running up frocks, is busy spouting apocalyptic nonsense.
What Rabanne says is that the Nostradamus quote can be "interpreted" as meaning that the Mir space station will crash-land on to Earth on August 11th (also the day of the eclipse). Leaving aside that Rabanne's "interpretation" defies any sort of logical examination and the man has a track record for, apparently, saying the first thing that comes into his head, he has excelled himself this time by actually telling us where the Mir will crash: it's going to be somewhere in the Gers county of south-western France and it will also take out Paris while it's at it.
Back in the real world, the people in Gers county are none too happy about Rabanne's "predictions", and the local council has served a lawsuit on him, on the grounds that he was undermining the tourist industry and nobody would visit the area if they thought a bloody big space station would come crashing through their camper van.
All of this is upsetting the people at the Nostradamus Museum in Provence who are tired of answering telephone inquiries about the coming apocalypse, with people asking them if they had any insider information about the "event". "We've had a steady flow of callers," says Ms Allemand, the curator of the museum. "The other night a young pregnant woman called to ask if Paris is really going to disappear in a ball of fire on August 11th."
Meanwhile, a well-known Nostradamus "expert", Jean Charles de Fontbrune has been entertaining France with his own "interpretations", which include the next 26 years bringing plague, famine and war to Europe, France being overrun by Muslims (nothing like playing the race hate card, Mr Fontbrune, is there?) and Britain being invaded by an Iraqi-Russian alliance.
"These `interpretations' are ridiculous," says Ms Allemand, "they are proof that you can see in Nostradamus whatever you want. But there are a lot of fragile people all across the planet who tend to believe these catastrophic scenarios, especially as there is a general sense of anguish over the millennium".
Paco Rabanne could not be contacted for this article. Not that I wanted to speak to him anyway.
