What keeps my father going is the thought that one day he will be vindicated

In the Montblanc/Spectator Art of Writing Award last year, readers were invited to submit a short essay on the subject of immortality. Here is the winning entry.

My father is old. He does not believe in God. He was 90 in December, an event celebrated with a family lunch at a hotel of his choosing. It was a very happy day, for both he and my mother are physically and mentally fit, but I was aware that he resists death. He will not go gentle into that good night, not because he is frightened of dying, but because he is afraid of the loss of his ideas.

For half a century my father has pursued ideas about the evolution of modern man. He believes that our species is the result of isolation on an island in the Indian Ocean. The sea, he maintains, has been left out of evolutionary theory. He has never found a publisher for any of his extensively researched writings, and they have long been the subject of affectionate family mockery.

One of his theories concerns a bipedal mammal which survived the cataclysm of 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs were apparently dealt a lethal blow by an asteroid landing in the Gulf of Mexico. This mammal lived chiefly on reptile eggs, and thereby bequeathed to us our particular facility with ball games, our otherwise primitive hands becoming perfect for throwing and catching.

This is typical of my father’s ideas. At first they provoke a little gentle ridicule, then dismissal. Some time later, however, they often prove to be not quite so eccentric after all. His theory of the bipedal egg-throwers is a good example. Until very recently it was thought that mammals of that period were the size of shrews. Then, many years after my father first proposed his theory, a number of fossilised mammals from the same period were found in China.