Great Uncle Fred? What can we expect? Grown-ups have a hard time sometimes, don’t they? What is the best time in life, what is the worst? (Harry, Spring 2008)

Well now, it has been said that if you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk ... if you want to be happy for a year, get married ... and if you want to be happy forever, learn to fish! Gardening is also mentioned as a guaranteed happiness-inducer. But these are only suggestions. What all these routes to happiness require is total absorption in the moment. You can be happily married all your life but that first year is liable to be when you are totally immersed in the joy of it, so immersed that you don’t know it yourself. The same might be said for the first hour of drinking hard. Real, deep happiness seems to require a certain loss of self, an absolute concentration in whatever you are doing. It has also been said that the only way to be free is to be good at your job and therefore take delight in it. This, it might be said, amounts to roughly the same thing. Concentration, patience, skill, usefulness - these are all likely to be in evidence at the best of times. And the worst of times come perhaps when none of these are in evidence, when one feels that one has no purpose. Times of bereavement, or rage, or jealousy, say, might look like the worst of times but at least one is absolutely even thrillingly alive at such moments. What is worse is torpor, boredom, uselessness. Such responses are plain wrong: whatever life is, it is not, or should not ever be thought, dull.

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