Nobody, perhaps out of kindness, queried the premise of the motion – to ask if "Corbyn's Labour" exists or will go on existing.
He said: "A visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, will convince you why the state of Israel exists and must go on existing.
The most enjoyable works of fiction present us with convincing worlds; we believe our favourite characters existed before "once upon a time" and go on existing after the final full stop.
One of the immigrant narrators of "Nowhere Man" has the feeling that "most of the things in this world would go on existing whether I lived or died.
If, having obtained that, she allows the capacity for pleasure to go on existing, she does so only out of absentmindedness, just as certain insects go on wearing their mating colors after the mating season is over.
And the gravelly beach and the rough boat deck where they meet in her dreams are "like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there".
One Cecily Crocker became Cecily Eaves and had a gay son who wrote stories and poems; another went on existing in her imagination, and quite possibly didn't pass her 11-plus, or, when mocked by a pompous headmistress for her "awful Cockney accent", instead of growing quietly determined, left school at 15.
John Bassett, now at RUSI and formerly GCHQ's Senior UK Liaison Officer in Washington, adds that much of the new government funding has gone on, "existing programmes... designed to get a really strong grip on global situational awareness".
Detoxification is a necessity for life on the planet to go on existing.
Both the creator and the created grapple constantly with how or why anyone does anything at all, how to go on existing in the general feeling of nothing that fills the day.
