‘Grandma A spoke of Armageddon and the Last Days like she had seen them personally,’ Billy B said as he thought of today’s problems. ‘She told me that the blood would flow up to the horse’s bridle…and I had to look up bridle to know what she was speaking of,’ he continued.

‘Well…many of the old-time gospel folks took what the Bible said literally and transferred the scripture to current events, Chet mused. ‘When I was but a lad preachers told us that the End Times were upon us…and we were sore afraid,’ he added.

‘Rome was the most powerful nation of its time and yet it fell,’ Neva J said with some knowledge acquired of her voracious reading.’ ‘Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus wrote of calamity coming,’ she continued.

‘It has been postulated that if time travel is real we may indeed have visitors from the future and the past as well,’ Chet said. ‘Perhaps they are some of those people that you experience de ja vu when you see them…,’ he noted.

‘Could it be that the circular theory of time has some validity…that we are living a bit on a phonograph record and what we experience…has been experienced before,’ Jane asked? ‘Cults are bad but are there prophets in our midst that are not attempting to control people or fleece them of their finances,’ she added.

‘When I visited Oxford University I had a distinct feeling that I had been there before,’ Billy B said. ‘The building and grounds and even the Pubs were familiar to me…yet I had never been there…,’ he explained.

‘Perhaps the End Times are a bit longer than our measurement of time,’ Chet offered.

‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, and the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

‘Surely the Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with a lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it fell shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And the rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?…,’ said the woman washing dishes in the White House… W.B. Yeats