My ex-girlfriend would always accuse me of being a cultural snob. Ham-fisted efforts to read Proust on the beach, pig-headed plans to visit the Renoir in Bloomsbury, well-meaning yet ill-fated constructive criticism on her choice of Toxic Bachelors as holiday reading, were always met with a sneering: “You. are such a fucking pseeeeeuuudo chin-stroker.”

In a way she was right. I think people into the arts who aren’t Tolstoy or Brian Sewell will always feel slightly insecure about the sum of their cultural clout, and thus the need to tell everyone that they’ve got the arts locked down, sealed off, noone else can enter, cau’ I run this bloodclaat perimeter anyone test Dead…! if you see what I mean.

So anyway, I went to see 2012, Sunday ave, and actually thought it was wicked! I’m not going to give you an in-depth film review, I just remember sitting there, absorbedly biting at my Twister as I watched gleaming high rises turn into enormous waves of splintered glass, the ground buckling and rising so much that a subway train hurtles out of a gigantic fissure in the earth, to be underflown by a cessna carrying John Cusack et al.

I was on my own (say it proud) but found myself gleefully looking to this 11-year old kid to my left in search of some kind of validation for my intense sour-apple-slices enjoyment. This was cinema. This was real.

In Jamaica when they first had the cinema rude boys would shoot at the screen during the wild west craze; Garcia Marquez describes the terrified residents of Macondo who saw the moving image as reality, one of terrifying extremes that introduced them to monsters and murders, always in a strange darkened room.

The age of abstracted critique, of levels of entertainment, had not arrived. This was how I saw 2012; I was ducking and weaving, bopping and shucking, praying that the cessna would reach the Space-Ark that would take the chosen 400,000 survivors to the haven-planet. Being a dad is gonna be fuuuuuuuuuuunn.