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Good morning. If I could promise you greater happiness this very day, would you be interested? What is happiness? Is it wealth? Health? Success? A smile from someone you love? Should government pursue it? Is it objective or subjective? Time was, when fortune was measured in enough to eat and a roof over your head. Now it seems to come down to feelings. The Tenth World Happiness Report, a collaboration between two academics from the London School of Economics and Columbia University, interviewed over a hundred thousand people in a hundred and thirty seven countries. And found that, despite global economic slump and nearly seven million deaths, we are on average just as happy as before the pandemic. Obviously if you lost someone to Covid you won’t score the same as someone who prefers to work from home. And critics have suggested the parameters may not be clearly defined and some people’s happiness could be at the expense of others’. But caveats notwithstanding, there are interesting findings. “Despite the magnitude of suffering and damage in Ukraine”, the Report says, benevolence scored record levels as did donations and helping strangers. Perhaps less surprising: not only are more prosperous countries happier but also countries with more equality of happiness score higher than those where the happiness gap is greater. Reading this after three difficult years reminds me of a delightful detail about my father. Wanting to combat his loneliness after losing my mother I invited many of his pupils to visit and discovered that, in his first teaching post after the war, he was known universally as Smiler. He explained he was simply so happy to be among those too young to have known war’s horrors, he couldn’t stop beaming. I thought of him too when I read yesterday of the Silver Swimmers: a team in their seventies and more whose record-breaking swim across the Channel was disqualified on a technicality, and who are fighting the ruling. My father enjoyed the North Sea late into his tenth decade and I, like many others, discovered during 2020 that it’s a lot harder for anything to get you down if you’ve cracked the ice or swum through snow before breakfast. Friends can’t think of anything worse… and of course, happiness is also different for each of us. But one thing seems axiomatic. Throughout Judeo-Christian scripture blessing is associated with walking with God, with justice, with doing right by others. Which also came out of this latest Happiness Report. Quotes: “the undoubted pains were offset by increases in [being] able to discover and share the capacity to care for each other in difficult times.” So here’s the promise: do something kind for someone else today, and you will go to bed happier than if you hadn’t.