There comes a time in every girl’s life when she needs to take herself in hand and cheer herself up. For me, it’s generally about now each year, when the nights draw in and my birthday is imminent.

A fortnight in Anguilla would be just the ticket, but is sadly over-ambitious, so I am nothing if not resourceful closer to home. I turn for advice to the trashy magazines that I read when I’ve run out of trashy books. The path to happiness, they say in primary-coloured headlines, is paved with handsome men and buying things, preferably together. This is no help. So, instead, I have compiled a self-help list of Cheap Ways To Be Happier, which runs, in no particular order, as follows.

1. Get out of bed.

2. Apply make-up.

3. Drink more cocktails. (It occurs to me that happiness could lie in combining some of the above and factoring in a handsome man.)

4. Find God. Religion leaves me cold, but it seems to make plenty of other people happy (or, occasionally, mad). Plus, divine will means you’ve always got someone to blame when your life’s crap. How fabulous is that? A complete abdication of responsibility for the rubbishness of your own life in three little words: “It’s God’s will.”

5. A cup of tea and a heavily buttered crumpet. I got stuck at 5. Everything else I could think of is expensive: good red wine, By Terry make-up, caviar. Why can’t I find happiness in a bacon butty or a week in Southport?

Why am I so shallow that there is a direct causal link between how much something costs and how much I like it? I blame my parents: they brought me up with a healthy appreciation of the finer things in life and an inability to earn a wage that could support it. They paid for an expensive education that has left me unable to add up, ignorant of almost everything and largely unemployable, or at any rate totally unsuited to a lucrative career as a banker. Why didn’t they beat me until fractions made sense? Couldn’t they have locked me in my room until I could do mental arithmetic? So selfish. Shamed by my own ignorance, I recently shelled out £9.99 for a book called I Used to Know That: Stuff You Forgot from School. Most of it was news to me, and the chapter on maths had much the same effect on me as Daleks on a five-year-old.

So, here I am: nearly a year older and not one jot wiser. But one thing I do know: if the secret to a happy life lies anywhere, I’m more likely to find it in a cup of tea and a crumpet than a pew. But if anyone would like to send me to Anguilla, I’ll gladly look for it there. The path to righteousness is paved with selfless acts.

Carol Midgley is away

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