I have a friend who, when he was a young boy, was fascinated by the idea of the apocalypse. He was not terrified or even mildly scared of the prospect of the end of the world. Rather, he was excited by it. Apparently, he had read The Day Of The Triffids several times and was genuinely beguiled by the notion of the wiping out of the entire human race because, and I am not making this up, he would be free to spend all day sitting on a mountain of crisps reading comic books and watching films, all the while…