Ebay and The End of The World

I've been buying stuff on eBay again.  A locomotive and a restaurant car this time.  Of the model variety, obviously.  I'm pretty pleased that I got the pair for under twenty quid.  I would have got them even cheaper if someone hadn't made a half hearted attempt to bid me up on the locomotive at the last minute.  I've found that by selecting items carefully, you can often end up as the sole bidder - for model railway related stuff, at least.   One tactic is not to use the exact search term for what you are looking for, but some variation, which will often turn up stuff listed under the wrong category or description.  Another is to find stuff which would otherwise be considered 'collectible', which usually drives the price up ridiculously, but which is damaged, modified or simply repainted.  The locomotive I've just bought falls into this category: a Hornby Dublo item which I've sometimes seen go for ludicrous prices in the past.  But this one had been badly repainted, so the collectors weren't interested.  Sure, I'm going to have to repaint it, but I don't mind that.  Besides, it will be a pretty straightforward repaint: once the old paint is stripped off, it will be resprayed in plain black and British Railways decals and numbers added.

But I don't know why I'm bothering with this buying activity (or, indeed, writing this post) as the world is scheduled to end tomorrow, thereby rendering anything we do irrelevant.  That's right, according to the usual nut jobs, the earth is going to be struck by a 'rogue planet' and destroyed.  Yeah, a 'rogue planet', you know, the sort that randomly floats around space failing to get captured by the gravitational fields of the stars whose solar systems they wander through.  Of course, NASA are denying the existence of any such heavenly body, but what do they know, eh?  I mean, it isn't as if the situation is without precedent.  I seem to recall that the original planet of the Cybermen, Mondas, came wandering close to the earth in Dr Who.  They landed at the North Pole - or was it the South? - and tried to steal the earth's energy.  And NASA didn't seem to know anything about that.  So it is perfectly feasible that a wandering planet will destroy us all tomorrow.  Still, if nothing else, it means I won't have to worry about the result of the Spurs-West Ham match this weekend...