Brexit … and happiness

I’ve never wanted to use this blog as a repository for banal ‘oh and here’s another thing that makes me happy’ observations. And I certainly wouldn’t want, God forbid, to suggest that Brexit is an issue that has made me happy. But one thing the current furor has managed to achieve is a 1000-fold increase in my interest in political debate and – mirabile dictu – parliamentary procedure.

And to break my blog-rule just this once, as an ingredient for my personal happiness there’s nothing to beat a good drama. James Graham is one of my favourite playwrights, and his piece Brexit – the Uncivil War, which aired last Monday on Channel 4, was very good. It featured Benedict Cumberbatch (above right) as Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave (above left). 

I have many thoughts about the extent to which it’s permissible to tinker with history in a political play (remembering here that everything that happened up to about five minutes ago is history). I won’t go into that now, but I tend to be quite hard line: if you want to alter the facts, then why don’t you just invent your own bloody story instead of filching one from history? But a bit of information gleaned from a review of the Graham play has made me think again. Perhaps every political play should be allowed one completely made-up meeting between important characters. In Schiller’s Mary Stuart it’s a meeting between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots that never happened. Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon has, not exactly a meeting, but a late-night phone-call in which Richard Nixon admits his guilt to David Frost. And in Brexit – the Uncivil War a climactic encounter in a pub between Cummings and the spin doctor and Remain campaigner Craig Oliver is, I now learn, entirely fictional. 

Just one, mind. That’s my maximum. I’ve already broken two of my rules in this blog, and the rot has to stop somewhere. 

Happy old year

2019 is well under way, and it’s high time I reported on the UK happiness stats for April 2017 to March 2018, which were published last September by the Office of National Statistics. There’s nothing to get hugely excited about, however. The averages remain the same as the ones for 2017/16. ‘How happy yesterday?’ stays at 7.5, ‘how anxious’ is at 2.9, life satisfaction 7.7 and ‘things you do in your life worthwhile’ is at 7.9.

Northern Ireland remains the happiest of the countries making up the UK, in spite of having no sitting parliament and being in the front line of political skirmishing for quite some time now. And Rushmoor in Hampshire has overtaken Craven in North Yorkshire as our happiest district – its ‘happy yesterday?’ rating shot up from 7.8 to 8.4. One of the towns in the Rushmoor district is Aldershot, which has a large training camp on its fringes and advertises itself as ‘the Home of the British Army’. It seems laughable to some of us that  it should be the happiest town in Britain, but that’s just prejudice – I have to admit that I’ve never actually been there. It’s an affluent area, and that probably helps. But more intriguing is the information that Aldershot has the largest Nepalese population and the largest Buddhist community in the UK. Surely that in itself contributes to its happiness quotient?

So … by the end of March 2018 our Brexit woes hadn’t apparently had any impact at all on our happiness scores. We do have to bear in mind of course that the majority of people in the UK voted in favour of Brexit, so by no means everyone is pissed off by it (something that we Remainers are often inclined to forget – democracy is OK as long as it’s going your way). Still, a lot has happened in the last nine months, so we’ll just have to wait to see what the crop of statistics for 2019 yields.