Dad II: The Cheerful Existentialist

Read that Father's Day post again -- or trust me if you like -- and it seems clear that the word extremist, used more than once by me to describe my dear old dad Jim Goodwin is both accurate (and of course deliberately self-revealing, and is Will Self's wonderful essay on his father) and a displacement of some desire to describe him as an existentialist, which he very clearly was -- even though he did not, as far as we know, read any of the books. He stuck by that stoically, too, right up until the rotten bitter endgame (as my sister Jane will attest) and we all admire him very much for that. But he was, most def my dad, an existentialist. 

Although now he is an ex-existentialist.