‘I do not fear death’, said Mark Twain. ‘I was dead for billions of years before I was alive, and it caused me not the slightest inconvenience’. For me, the idea that my own mortality is something I have to ‘come to terms with’ is an odd one, like saying one has to come to terms with the fact that night follows day.

My consciousness and personality clearly cannot survive the death of my brain and the rest of my body. It’s obviously impossible. How could the various atoms and molecules which comprise my dead body somehow reform themselves into a version of myself and continue living in some way? And would I really want them to? Equally, the notion put forward by religions that human consciousness survives death in some ‘spiritual’ form can only ever be a matter of pure speculation and imagination. There is no evidence for it: on the contrary, all the evidence is that death is the end of the individual.

So I accept that after I am dead I will no longer exist, any more than I existed for the first 14 billion years following the Big Bang. The truly amazing thing is that I am alive right now, looking out of my conservatory window as I type this, watching the sparrows on the bird feeders, and admiring the snowdrops on the rockery as the weak February sunshine slants across them. For me to exist a certain sperm had to meet a certain egg. My parents had to be born and survive long enough to meet each other, as did their parents and their parents, and so on back (almost) ad infinitum. Being alive is so remarkably unlikely, statistically speaking, that it needs celebrating every moment of every day. So the answer to my own mortality is simple: I try to live healthily so as to postpone my death for as long as possible; and I try to live well and be happy while I am here.