The Geography of Bliss

Chapter 8: GREAT BRITAIN

A couple of years ago, an unusual experiment took place in a dreary English town named Slough (rhymes with “plough”). The experiment, like all grand experiments of our day, was made for television. The BBC retained six “happiness experts” and set them loose on Slough, hoping to “change the psychological climate” of the place.

When I first heard that phrase, I was instantly intrigued. It dawned on me that I had overlooked an important component in the happiness equation: change. Here I was skipping across the globe, looking for the world’s happiest places, even visiting the world’s least happy place, but all the while assuming that these places were static, immovable. They were either happy or not. But, of course, places, like people, change. Maybe not much, maybe not often, but surely they do. And here was a deliberate, ambitious attempt to take an unhappy place and make it happy—or at least happier. Could it be done?

I arrive, bleary eyed, at London’s Heathrow Airport, my mood elevated by the fact that the United States and Britain enjoy a “special relationship,” as Winston Churchill called it. I’ve always liked that expression, a chummy term of endearment that stands out amid the steely vernacular of international diplomacy. I was feeling special indeed, uncharacteristically relaxed, as I strolled up to the immigration official. We’re pals, he and I. Even his clothes put me at ease. Instead of police or military uniforms, British immigration officials wear blazers, as if you were attending some fancy cocktail party and they were your host.

I hand the man in the blazer my passport, figuring this shouldn’t take long.

“What is your purpose for visiting the UK?” “I’m doing research for a book.”

“And what exactly is this book about?” “Happiness.”

Until now, he has been glancing down at my passport, but now he looks me squarely in the eye. It is not the look of a pal.

“Happiness?” “Yes, sir.”

“In the UK?”

“Um, yes.”

Clearly, my story is not plausible. Possibly a cover, and a flimsy one at that, for nefarious doings. He peppers me with questions. How long will I be in the UK? Whom am I staying with? Was this person British or American? Was I a terrorist? Okay, he didn’t ask that last question, but it was implied. Finally, after twenty minutes of grilling, just when I fear the possible onset of a cavity search, he stamps my passport, reluctantly.

“Suspicion of happiness is in our blood,” said English travel writer E. V. Lucas. Or, as one Brit told me, in colloquial American so I could understand, “We don’t do happiness.” No indeed. A stiff upper lip may come in handy when German bombs are raining down, but it gets in the way of a good smile.

In Britain, the happy are few and suspect. If you are English and, through no fault of your own, find yourself inexplicably joyful, do not panic. Remain calm and heed the advice of English humorist Jerome K. Jerome: “Don’t show [your happiness] but grumble along with the rest.” For the British, happiness is a transatlantic import. And by “transatlantic” they mean American. And by “American” they mean silly, infantile drivel. Confectionary.

I step outside the terminal to a dreary London day and take a taxi to visit my friend Rob and his wife, Nancy. Rob, as you recall, is the Closet American, the man of a thousand refills. He’s back in London now, working as a “foreign” correspondent in his own country. That seems right to me. There’s no one better suited than Rob, an insider/outsider, to explain Britain to an American audience. Rob speaks both languages.

Rob’s house is nice and cozy and exudes that worn charm that the English do so well. Nancy had a “proper” English upbringing. This means she is chronically polite and bakes her own bread and heats the dinner plates in the oven. Like her husband, though, she doesn’t quite feel comfortable in her English skin, and the couple escapes to America every chance they get.

The three of us sit down over a bottle of wine, and, as inevitably happens when Brits and Americans get together, the conversation turns to the differences that bind us, differences not immediately apparent because of the common language that divides us.

“In America,” says Nancy, “every conversation is held as if it might be your last on Earth. Nothing is held back. I always want to say, ‘I’m sorry, but I just met you. I don’t know you. I really don’t need to hear about your hysterectomy.’ “

Nancy, though, never actually says that. It would be offensive, and the English go to great lengths to avoid offending anyone, any time, and in any way. Nancy finds this English reserve as disconcerting as American loquaciousness.

“Here, people cut themselves off from a happy little center,” she says. “I was standing in a queue at the Tate Gallery the other day, and I started to chat with people—you know, small talk, like ‘Terrible queue, isn’t it?’—but nobody said anything. They just looked at me like I was crazy. In the UK, we don’t want to bother anyone. When someone dies, we don’t call the relatives to offer our sympathies because we’re afraid we might disturb them. We don’t want to be too loud, too American.”

Being too American, or American at all, is pretty much the worst thing a Brit can be. “American” is synonymous with pushiness, tactlessness, and puppy-dog earnestness. Americans buy self-help books as if their lives depend on them. Brits, as a rule, do not. Such pap is seen as a sign of weakness. One Brit quipped that if his countrymen were to embrace a self-help book, it would probably be something like I’m Not OK, You’re Even Less OK.

For the English, life is about not happiness but muddling through, getting by. In that sense, they are like the ancient Aztecs. When an Aztec child was born, a priest would say, “You are born into a world of suffering; suffer then and hold your peace.” There is something noble in that attitude, that quiet suffering. True, Aztec civilization died out centuries ago, leaving only a few ruins now trampled on by sunburned American tourists. But never mind. At least they had the decency not to whine about their demise. You have to respect that in a dying civilization.

At this point, Rob interjects, feeling compelled, I suspect, to defend his homeland. The British, he declares, possess a “latent happiness.” It’s there, lurking deep in their bowels. You just can’t see it. Or feel it. Or hear it. Or detect it in any way known to man. But it’s there, Rob assures me.

The same year that Thomas Jefferson penned the “pursuit of happiness” line in the Declaration of Independence, in London Jeremy Bentham, a young, unhappy lawyer (is there any other kind?) was writing his treatise on “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” and working on his “felicific calculus.”

Bentham’s philosophy, utilitarianism, lacks the gung-ho optimism that Americans savor. Like the British themselves, utilitarianism is practical and devoid of any mawkishness. But the goal is the same: a happy nation, latently or otherwise.

I decide to visit Jeremy Bentham. He resides at the campus of University College London. The buildings are all old and regal. They look like cathedrals more than classrooms. Bentham is in one of these buildings, but which one?

I find an information desk and approach the young blonde sitting behind the counter.

“May I help you?”

“Yes, I’d like to see Jeremy Bentham.” “Do you have an extension?”

“Oh, no, he’s not alive anymore.”

Her eyes grow wide. “I’m sorry I can’t help you, sir,” she says, clearly calculating whether I am a harmless loony or a dangerous loony.

“No. You don’t understand. He died about two hundred years ago, but he’s still on campus.”

Dangerous loony. She’s about to call security when a grad student intervenes on my behalf.

“You’re looking for the auto-icon,” he says. “The what?”

“The auto-icon.” That is, it turns out, what the now-dead Jeremy Bentham is called. The grad student gives me directions to another building, and there I find him, sitting quietly in one corner. He looks good for his age.

He’s sitting on a wooden chair, the same chair where he wrote his happiness papers, and wearing the same clothes he wore when he died in 1832: black vest and sport coat and a wicker hat. Underneath the clothes is his real skeleton. This is the way Bentham wanted it.

Bentham loved good philosophical banter, and he didn’t see why death should interfere with that. His will included these instructions: “If it should happen that my personal friends and other disciples should be disposed to meet . . . the founder of the greatest happiness system . . . will from time to time come to be conveyed to the room in which they meet.” To this day, rumor has it, Bentham is wheeled into university meetings, where he is listed as “present but not voting.”

For Bentham, happiness was a mathematical proposition, and he spent years fine-tuning his “felicific calculus,” a wonderfully disarming term. I, for one, never associated calculus with felicity.

It’s simple math, though. Add up the pleasurable aspects of your life, then subtract the unpleasant ones. The result is your overall happiness. The same calculations, Bentham believed, could apply to an entire nation. Every action a government took, every law it passed, should be viewed through the “greatest happiness” prism. Bentham, for instance, reasoned that giving ten dollars to a poor man counted more than giving ten dollars to a wealthy man, since the poor man derived more pleasure from it.

Bentham’s theory is intriguing but flawed. For instance, he didn’t distinguish, qualitatively, one pleasure from another. The pleasure accrued by helping a little old woman across the street was for him on par with the pleasure a sadist derived by beating that same old woman senseless. For Bentham, pleasure was pleasure.

Another pitfall: Utilitarianism is interested only in making t h e majority of people happy. It is concerned with the happiness of the many, not the misery of the few, which is fine if you are lucky enough to be among the happy many, but not so fine if you find yourself among the miserable few. To this day there persist in Britain Bentham-ite tendencies, a willingness to accept government intervention into people’s lives for the common good. The British happily pay a licensing fee to the BBC for every TV set they own. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, recently imposed a congestion fee for drivers to enter central London during peak hours. It is classic utilitarianism. A relatively few people—drivers who want to enter central London—are rendered considerably less happy so that the vast majority of Londoners are made a little more happy. Now New York has latched onto the idea, though it has proved more controversial than in London. That’s not surprising. Americans are less utilitarian than the British.

These days, talk of happiness is popping up everywhere in Britain. “We should be thinking not just what’s good for putting money in people’s pockets but what is good for putting joy in people’s hearts.” Those words were uttered not by some Americanized fruitcake or far-left politician but by the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, David Cameron, a man who aspires to the prime minister’s office. Speaking of which, let’s not forget the former prime minister, Tony Blair, the most optimistic, happiness-prone leader the British have ever known. Blair possessed a fierce optimism that was borderline American. For starters, Blair smiled, something his predecessors proudly avoided. Blair was intrigued by the emerging science of happiness and toyed with the idea of converting theory into policy. In 2002, his Strategy Unit convened a “life-satisfaction” seminar. Some (not Blair) called this group the Department of Happiness.

The group published an analytical paper suggesting— just suggesting, mind you—ways in which government might boost national happiness. Among the proposals: a happiness index, akin to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness; teaching “happiness skills” in schools; encouraging “a more leisured work-life balance”; and imposing higher taxes on the wealthy.

It was the last suggestion, as you can imagine, that got the most attention. The notion of higher taxes as a path to happiness was first proposed by British economist Richard Layard. The wealthy, Layard argues, incite envy in others, spewing a sort of “social pollution.” So, Layard reasons, just as we levy fines on industrial polluters so, too, should we fine these envy generators, the wealthy. Not surprisingly, the idea has met some resistance. “Beware the Happiness Brigade” screamed a typical headline. Others wondered why the wealthy should be punished just because some people can’t get a handle on their envy issues.

Libertarians went ballistic: Bureaucrats can’t manage to fix potholes, how are they going to make us happy? Besides, the major factors that determine our happiness— friendship, sex, trust—are largely beyond government’s control anyway.

I’m sympathetic to these concerns, and I’m not advocating a Department of Happiness in any government, but let’s not forget that government is already in the happiness business. Every time it offers tax incentives for married couples or mandates the wearing of seat belts or strives to increase gross domestic product, it’s sticking its nose in our happiness. Besides, what is the role of government if not to make the citizenry happier?

The BBC producers did not choose Slough by accident. The town, just outside London and underneath a flight path to Heathrow Airport, is a one-word punch line in Britain. The name itself is trouble. “Slough” means, literally, muddy field. A snake sloughs, or sheds, its dead skin. John Bunyan wrote of the “slough of despond” in Pilgrim’s Progress. In the 1930s, John Betjeman wrote this poem about Slough :

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now There isn’t grass to graze a cow, Swarm over, Death!Then he got nasty. To this day, the residents of Slough rankle when anyone mentions the poem. The town’s reputation as a showpiece of quiet desperation was cemented when the producers of the TV series The Office decided to set the show in Slough.

The unspoken assumption now is that if these six experts can make Slough happy, they can make anyplace happy. The series aired before I arrived in the UK, so I procure the DVDs and sit down in Rob’s living room to watch Making Slough Happy. The screen fills with an aerial view of a large town: “the much-maligned Berkshire town of Slough,” a narrator informs me gravely.

We’re introduced to the happiness experts who are, to a man and woman, insufferably chipper. The narrator, in a voice-of-God tenor, explains the experiment. The happiness experts have selected fifty volunteers from Slough. They will undergo twelve weeks of intensive “happiness training.” Then, they will spread the happiness virus throughout the town, thus changing the “psychological climate of Slough.” That’s the idea, at least.

This ought to be interesting. I pour myself a glass of wine and lean back in the chair. The first task is to take the volunteers’ “happiness temperature.” The Sloughites, it turns out, are about as happy as the rest of Britain, which is to say fair to middling—well below the supremely content Swiss and Danes but comfortably above the mopey Moldovans.

In the effort to boost happiness levels, no exercise is considered too far-fetched or embarrassing. Or American. The Sloughites hold hands. They hug one another. They hug trees. They perform something called biodanza. They do tai chi. They do yoga. They laugh uncontrollably. They submerge themselves in flotation tanks. They dance in the aisles of a supermarket.

I hit the pause button. I can’t take it anymore. Watching Brits shed their inhibitions is like watching elephants mate. You know it happens, it must, but it’s noisy, awkward as hell, and you can’t help but wonder: Is this something I really need to see?

Deep breath. I reach for the remote. Click. Each of the Slough fifty is handed a happiness manifesto. It contains ten mostly commonsense tips, like phone a friend or count your blessings or, my favorite, cut your TV viewing by half. The irony—that the manifesto itself is part of a TV program —seems lost on all involved.

In one episode, a few of the Slough fifty hop into a limousine and visit a lottery winner. She tells them that— surprise!—her life isn’t necessarily happier, only more comfortable. Her brother died recently, and she says she’d gladly give up every dollar of her lottery winnings to have him back.

Click. Another episode. One of the happiness experts, a toothy psychologist named Richard Stevens, is vacuuming a floor with a maniacal look in his eye while uplifting music plays in the background. “You can vacuum with care and love,” he tells one of the Slough fifty, who looks incredulous. Then there’s eighty three-year-old Rex Burrow, who says he still has “much to do” in life. I don’t think he means vacuuming, though I could be mistaken.

One of the more interesting experiments was the “graveyard therapy.” (Once again, death intrudes into a book about happiness.) Stevens organized a trip to a local cemetery so that participants could realize that “we are all going to end up dead, but for the moment we are alive.” Some of the participants found the exercise uplifting. Others found it creepy. One woman broke down in tears.

Finally, the big moment. The twelve weeks are over. It’s time to see if the Slough fifty have boosted their happiness levels and, perhaps, changed the psychological climate of this much-maligned Berkshire town. First, there is the requisite dramatic tension—some hugging, some crying, some mood music. Stevens, glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, reviews the data, while the rest of the happiness experts look on in anticipation. The envelope, please. And . . . it’s a huge success, Stevens declares. The Slough fifty have boosted their happiness levels by 33 percent. Stevens has never seen anything like it. The group had started with happiness levels on par with that of China. Now they’ve surpassed even Switzerland and Denmark. If Slough were a country, it would be the happiest in the world. Champagne is poured, a toast proposed: “To increased happiness everywhere.” Hear, hear. Clink glasses, roll credits.

That’s the TV version of Making Slough Happy. And, as we know, any overlap between TV and reality is purely coincidental. I can’t help but wonder: Did these happiness experts really change the psychological climate of Slough, or did they just tickle fifty of its residents for a while?

I call Richard Stevens. He sounds surprisingly brusque on the phone, borderline rude, not at all like the cheery, happy vacuuming, tree-hugging fellow on TV. Maybe he’s having a bad day. Even happiness experts get the blues. He does agree to meet me, though.

He’s wearing a white shirt and jeans. He is tan, suspiciously so. One does not tan naturally in Britain. It just doesn’t happen. Some sort of technology is required— either a tanning salon or an airplane. Stevens explains that it’s the latter; he’s just returned from a beach holiday in India. I silently wonder why he was so grumpy on the phone. His apartment is spotless, bright, and airy. There’s a piano in one corner, and above it a picture of a woman standing next to a young-looking Bill Clinton.

Stevens explains how he cobbled his “happiness tool kit” together from a variety of sources: Buddhism, evolutionary psychology, the new positive-psychology movement, South American dance. He and the other happiness experts had many obstacles to overcome. At first, the Slough town council wasn’t cooperative, and frankly I can’t blame them.

They’d been kicked in the backside many times in the past and weren’t about to bend over again, not even for the BBC.

Stevens explains that some of the exercises went over better than others. The biodanza proved tricky. Too sensual for your average Brit. The laughter yoga fell flat. This is where people get together and laugh, unprompted by jokes or humor of any kind. The idea is to trigger a physiological reaction and spread contagious laughter. Completely irrational, the laughter clubs started in India. I tried it once in Bombay. We gathered at a park early in the morning and stood in a circle. Under the tutelage of a cardiologist named Madan Kataria, we started laughing, just like that, for absolutely no reason. It worked. I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m laughing now, as I replay the event in my mind. Not the Brits, though. They prefer their main course of laughter served with an aperitif of humor.

I ask Stevens if it is possible, given enough time and resources, to really change the psychological climate of a place. He thinks for a moment before answering, no doubt aware of the fact that happiness levels are stubbornly stable.

“I suppose it is possible,” Stevens says. “There are all sorts of things I’d love to do—work with the schools for instance, build up the sense of community.” All of which is worthy. None of which makes for good television.

Stevens urges me to go to Slough and judge the results for myself. I was afraid he might say that. My last trip to an unhappy place, Moldova, left me in a funk for weeks afterward. I fear Slough may send me deeper into the abyss.

To steel myself, I go to see Tim LeBon, a “philosophical counselor.” He uses the teachings of the ancients to help people with their twenty-first-century problems. Relationship trouble? Jerk for a boss? Tim dips into the deep well of philosophy and channels Aristotle or Plato or, if he’s feeling ambitious, Nietzsche.

Tim had heard about my quest for the world’s happiest places and, like the immigration official at Heathrow, wondered what the hell I was doing in Britain. We meet at one of the happiest of British institutions: the local pub. It’s called Queen Boadicea, and it’s smoky and crowded and cozy. We manage to find an open sofa and order a couple of pints.

Tim has several clients. All foreigners. The British don’t do therapy, philosophical or any other kind, for the same reason they don’t buy self-help books. It’s seen as weakness. Tim tells me an apocryphal story. He went to his local library in search of an American self-help book called Changing for Good. The nearest he could find, though, was Changing for Dinner, a book about English etiquette. “That kind of sums it up right there,” says Tim, staring forlornly into his beer.

Woe be the British therapist. Tim’s friends don’t understand what he does for a living. Strangers are downright alarmed. They recoil in horror, as if he’s just confessed to being a pedophile. Or an American.

On the one hand, I understand their skepticism. I’ve had plenty of experience with therapists myself, and I can’t say it’s made me any happier. At the same time, the British reserve makes me uneasy. Not once has anyone here told me to “have a nice day.” I get the distinct impression they don’t want me to have a nice day or, at the very least, don’t care if I do. Maybe there is an undercurrent of warmth here, a subterranean channel of human affection, but if there is it is buried very, very deep.

I feel sorry for the Brits, deprived as they are of the salutary benefits of the self-help industrial complex. Isn’t there something we can do for these sad souls? Perhaps a New Age Marshall Plan. I picture planeloads of Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer books and CDs dropped by airplane over the English countryside, with little parachutes slowing their descent to earth, of course, for there is nothing more painfully ironic than being clocked on the head by Deepak Chopra and knocked unconscious. Loudspeakers could broadcast Marianne Williamson in the Tube. Yes, it would be another Blitzkrieg, though this time the bombs would be friendly, armed with payloads of glorious self- renewal.

Tim also teaches a course in positive psychology, but he is not a true believer. Sometimes, he tells me, people choose not to be happy, and that’s okay. Freud was dying of cancer, not far from this pub actually, yet he refused morphine. He wanted to continue to work and didn’t want to have his mind clouded. If you believe that pleasure, or at least the absence of pain, is man’s highest ideal, then Freud’s decision made no sense. Yet happiness, as Tim sees it, is more than simply an uninterrupted series of pleasurable moments, and that’s a point he feels the positive-psychology movement misses.

Tim also finds positive psychology’s emphasis on optimism troubling. Optimism is sometimes a wonderful thing, but not always. Tim gives me an example. Let’s say you’re on a flight, and there is a problem, an engine has caught fire. Would you want an optimistic pilot at the controls? Perhaps, but what you really want, Tim says, is a wise pilot. Wisdom born from years of experience.

“Part of positive psychology is about being positive, but sometimes laughter and clowns are not appropriate. Some people don’t want to be happy, and that’s okay. They want meaningful lives, and those are not always the same as happy lives.”

I can’t argue with that. Tim, I realize, neatly combines American optimism and British circumspection in one package. I bet he’s a good therapist.

Slough lies a few miles west of Heathrow Airport, just outside the M25 motorway, London’s equivalent of the Washington Beltway. This places Slough squarely in no- man’s-land, neither part of London nor divorced from it entirely. Not a happy space to occupy, as anyone in mid- divorce can attest.

I stroll down High Street. It is pleasant enough. It’s a pedestrian-only zone, which immediately endears it to me. Traffic has never been associated with happiness, and that holds true for both drivers and pedestrians. There are the usual fish-and-chips shops and curry shacks, plus an inordinate number of pawnshops and betting centers. The colors are muted and range from deeper to lighter shades of gray. The people seem gray, too, and slightly disheveled. The word “frumpy” springs to mind. Yes, that’s it, Slough is frumpy.

Slough has more than its share of “yobs,” the British term for young men who look like trouble. (Yob is “boy” spelled backward.) I had been warned about this. I can’t take the threat seriously, though. To me, a yob sounds like a stuffed toy I might buy for my two-year-old, not a social menace.

I pick up the local rag, the Slough Observer, and scan the headlines. There’s a story about growing resistance to “supermarket creep,” which I learn is not that weird guy eyeing women in frozen foods but, rather, the abundance of megastores that are driving the mom-and-pops out of business. There’s a story about a feud that’s broken out between rival taxi companies; apparently, they’re fighting over who has the right to pick up passengers at the train station. There’s a story about language courses for new immigrants and who should pay for them.

Slough, like much of Britain, is multicultural. On the one hand, this is welcome news. The immigrants have spiced up bland British cuisine, as well as the bland British personality. On the other hand, this influx of immigrants has brought problems. Most notably, Islamic terrorists. This is where political correctness and happiness research part ways. Diversity, that much heralded attribute, does not necessarily make for a happy place. The world’s happiest nations—Iceland, for instance—tend to be ethnically homogenous.

My first objective: Get underneath the skin of Slough. Peel back its copious layer of gloom and see what lies beneath. To accomplish this, I’ll need to dip into my journalist’s bag of tricks. We journalists are seducers, except it’s not sex we’re after (usually). It’s sound bites and quotes and information. Like all great seducers, we tailor our overtures to the conquest at hand.

As a radio journalist, my task has been complicated by the necessity of a microphone. You’d be surprised how many people around the world suffer from microphobia. The Japanese have a severe case. I remember once whipping out my microphone at a Tokyo department store. Judging from the look of sheer horror in people’s eyes, you’d think I’d just unholstered a semiautomatic pistol or dropped my pants.

_{In Arab countries, it’s crucial to graciously accept many, many cups of tea before asking anything that might be} construed as a substantive question. In India, I found that flattery was the way to get people to talk. In America, microphobia is extremely rare, and no such foreplay is necessary. If anything, the challenge is getting people to _{stop talking.}

I wasn’t quite sure how to handle the British. I briefly toy with the direct approach—“Hi, my name’s Eric. I’m from America. Are you happy?”—but quickly dismiss that idea, which no doubt would elicit a response in which the words “sod” and “off” feature prominently Instead, seasoned journalist that I am, I decide to drop by the local barbershop. This is a time-honored tradition among journalists, nearly as time honored as interviewing your local cab driver, but I was reluctant to get in the middle of Slough’s feuding taxi drivers.

Sabino’s Barber Shop looks like a local institution. In other words, it looks old. And a bit musty. My plan is to pass myself off as just another customer looking for a haircut. It’s a brilliant plan, except for one minor detail: I don’t have any hair. No problem. I unsheathe another weapon from my journalist’s arsenal: humor.

“Don’t suppose you offer discounts for the folliclely challenged?”

“No, but we do charge a search fee.”

Nice parry, old boy. English humor at its best. The witty bloke is Tony. Thick, black hair. A gut the size of a small refrigerator. Tony has lived in Slough all of his life. A fine place, he says. You can always find work here if you want. Or not. There’s always the dole. Tony gets a bit defensive when I mention the “friendly bombs” poem. That was a long time ago, he says, and besides, one of the poet’s daughters has since apologized on his behalf. Case closed.

_{“So, what exactly is so nice about Slough?” I ask, as} Tony scans my head for anything resembling hair.

“Well, we’re centrally located. You can get anywhere from here. It’s just twenty minutes to London or Reading. Windsor Castle is very close, too.”

Alarm bells go off inside my bald head. It’s never a good sign when the best thing to recommend a place is that it’s near other places. Just ask the residents of New Jersey. Tony and I talk awhile longer, as he goes through the motions of a haircut, and then I get up to leave.

I’m walking out the door when Tony recommends I visit the Slough Museum. “Make sure you set aside enough time —a good twenty minutes. You wouldn’t want to miss anything.” I can’t tell if Tony is being sarcastic or not but decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I find the Slough Museum on one end of High Street, looking forlorn and neglected. I walk inside, pay a small fee, and stroll around the exhibits, such as they are. I learn valuable Slough facts. For instance, as early as the seventeenth century, Slough was a popular rest stop for carriages traveling between London and Bath. In other words, even back then, it was a place near other places. I learn that Slough’s farmers had “such a plentiful supply of horse manure they didn’t have to leave their fields fallow.” Okay. What do we have so far? Historically, Slough was a pit stop full of manure.

Another exhibit features an old black-and-white photo of army trucks lined up as far as the eye can see. I read the placard: “During World War I, Slough was used as a repair depot for military vehicles, earning it the nickname of ‘The Dump.’ “

You have to say one thing about Slough. It’s consistent. Wait, wait, there is more. Neatly arranged behind a glass display case are some of the products made in Slough: socks, matchbox covers, Air Wick air fresheners (because of all that manure, no doubt), nail cream, Mars bars. Radar was supposedly invented in Slough, too. How ironic, I think, given that Slough hardly appears on anyone’s radar.

My twenty minutes are up. I need a drink. Once again, for research purposes. If you want to get to know an English town, you need to spend time at the local pub. Don’t take my word for it. Anthropologist Kate Fox says so. She spent years scrutinizing her fellow citizens as if she were studying some Stone Age tribe in Papua, New Guinea. In her book Watching the English, she describes the importance the natives ascribe to their drinking ritual: “It would be impossible even to attempt to understand Englishness without spending a lot of time at pubs.”

The pub is the one place where Brits discard their native shyness. The entire enterprise—“pub” is, after all, short for “public house”—is designed to encourage people to interact. That’s why there’s never waitress service at an English pub; instead, patrons are forced to order their drinks at the bar, where they invariably encounter others doing the same. Conversation ensues—awkward, roundabout, stuttering British conversation but conversation nonetheless.

The English penchant for strict rules of behavior extends into the pub. The one that sticks with me is this: Don’t introduce yourself right away. It’s considered “cloyingly American,” says Fox. I make note of that, and also of the fact that in the UK the word “American” is often preceded by the word “cloyingly.”

Finding a pub in an English town is as easy as finding a church in Alabama. Slough offers several choices. I like the looks of the Herschel Arms, named after Slough’s most famous son, Sir William Herschel, astronomer to King George III.

Despite its English pedigree, the Herschel Arms is owned by a witty Irishman named Tom. There’s bric-a-brac everywhere. An old sign for “Baldwin’s Nervous Pills,” which claims to cure “nervousness, irritability of temper, fear and dread.” There’s an old 1930s radio and another sign that says: “Avoid hangovers. Stay drunk.”

I plant myself at the bar and, following Fox’s advice, place a five-pound note in my hand. “It is acceptable to let bar staff know that one is waiting to be served by holding money or an empty glass in one’s hand,” she advises. On second thought, maybe this wasn’t necessary, since I’m the only one in the pub so far.

The beer arrives warm, of course, yet drinkable. I’m soaking up the overtly old-world atmosphere when I glance out the window and see an Islamic bookstore with a sign on its storefront glowing bright and clear: “There has come to you from Allah a light and a clear message.” Allah and pubs, cheek by jowl. I take a sip of my warm beer and silently toast the new Britain. God help it.

_{I’ve come here to speak with actual Sloughites, yet I’m} nervous at the same time. Kate Fox has scared me with her observation that “every pub has its own private code of in- jokes, nicknames, phrases and gestures.” How could I possibly know what they are?

Just as my anxiety is peaking, in walks a lanky man, dignified looking. Late sixties, probably. He’s wearing a perfectly tailored blazer with a handkerchief folded neatly in the pocket.

“Bloody awful weather we’re having.” “Yes,” I say, “bloody awful.”

The last two words sound ridiculous coming out of my American mouth, but the man either doesn’t notice or is too polite to say anything.

He leans toward me and says, “Did you know that this pub is named after William Herschel? He was an astronomer.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.”

“Did you know he discovered one of the planets?” “No, really, which one?”

“Uranus.”

There’s an awkward pause. I try not to snicker. I take a sip of beer. Suppress another snicker. Finally, he steps in and saves me.

“I know. Typical, isn’t it?”

With that, we share a good, hearty laugh.

The ice properly broken, I gingerly ask the man about Slough, careful not to offend his native sensibilities.

“So I take it you’re familiar with Slough’s, er, reputation.” “It’s well deserved. This is a godawful place. Total crap.”

So much for native sensibilities. He had heard something about Making Slough Happy but is deeply skeptical. He expresses this skepticism not by subtle English body language but by more scatological references.

“Look, if you have something fundamentally shitty, you can’t do much with it, can you?” With those few choice words, the man has dismissed the entire happiness experiment and much of the positive-psychology movement. I’m not sure how to respond, so I switch to a safer topic.

“Nice pub, isn’t it?”

“Oh, it used to be. But now it’s a bit over the top with the décor. And they serve food, you know. It’s all about the food now.” He says this last part with moral revulsion, as if the pub had taken to serving heroin with the beer, instead of onion rings.

We talk and drink. I order a round, which endears me to him, just as Kate Fox told me it would. A good hour into our conversation, we introduce ourselves. His name is Geoffrey, a morsel of information that I find as precious as any CIA intelligence. In Britain, finding out someone’s name isn’t pro forma. It’s an accomplishment.

Much beer is drunk and laughs shared, over what exactly I can’t recall. I’ve never seen anyone laugh quite like that before. His body stiff and erect, like a soldier’s, Geoffrey tilts his torso backward, so that it is at a forty-five-degree angle to his legs. It is a highly controlled laugh and, in that sense, a very English laugh.

Even in the inebriated atmosphere of the pub, the British remain economical with their emotions. Personal information is doled out judiciously, like premium chocolate or fine wine. As any economist will tell you, scarcity creates value. So when a Brit opens up, exposes their wounds, where it hurts, this is more valuable, more meaningful, than when an American does it. For the first time since I arrived in Britain, I appreciate the virtue of reticence.

I learn much about Geoffrey. I learn that he prefers warm weather over cold, that as far as he’s concerned “global warming is a good thing.” I learn that he is, in fact, flying to an Egyptian beach resort next week and that he “doesn’t give a fuck if the plane crashes” because he’s had a good life. I learn that Geoffrey’s wife died three years ago and, though he doesn’t quite say so, that he misses her very much.

I suspect this is the reason Geoffrey stays in Slough, though of course he would never confess to such a maudlin sentiment. The relationship between death and geography is complicated. Sometimes, when unspeakable tragedy strikes—when someone loses a child, for instance—they feel obliged to flee the scene immediately, hoping that by changing physical location they might lighten the unbearable grief pressing down on them. Other times, though, we feel compelled to stay. The place is all that remains, and to leave would feel like a betrayal. That, I think, is the case with Geoffrey. He doesn’t love Slough, but he loved his wife, loved her here, in this much-maligned Berkshire town, so here he stays.

Sure, he’s thought about leaving, Geoffrey tells me, but he can’t bring himself to do it. “I mean, in the end, you come home because this is where you live.” That last line strikes me as profound, though in my beer-addled state I can’t pinpoint why. It is only the next morning, after I have stumbled back to my hotel and collapsed into a deep, Slough sleep, that it dawns on me. You come home because this is where you live. It was Geoffrey’s matter-of- fact, proscriptively English way of saying what we all know to be true: Home is where the heart is.

I wake to fresh snow. It’s beautiful, coating the trees and the ground in a blanket of white. Apparently, though, snow is a rare event in the London area, and the few inches of powder have triggered a national emergency. All across southern England, people are wheeling out their stiff upper lips for the Big Snow Event, as a local newscaster breathlessly calls it. You’d think the Germans were firebombing London again. Schools are closed. Airports are closed. But, the breathless announcer reassures me, people are determined to continue with normal life. Otherwise, the snow wins, and we can’t have that.

I, too, am determined to stand firm in the face of the fluffy white flakes. I decide to keep my appointment with Heather White. She is one of the Slough fifty, and I’m curious to see if the TV experiment has had a lasting impact on her happiness. Heather lives on Shaggy Calf Lane. When she told me this on the phone, I smiled. It sounds like something out of a fable.

In person, though, Shaggy Calf Lane turns out to be just like any other English street. No calves in sight, shaggy or otherwise, just lots of small cars driving on the wrong side of the road. I walk up to Heather’s front door and ring the bell. I had prepared for our meeting by reading up on the natives’ greeting habits. What Samuel Johnson observed more than two hundred years ago holds true today: “When two Englishmen meet their first talk is of the weather.” Not just any talk but reassuring, comforting talk. “You must never contradict anyone when discussing the weather,” warns George Mikes, a Hungarian humorist. Right. Got it. Luckily for me, I had actual weather, the Big Snow Event, to talk about.

“Quite the weather we’re having,” I say to Heather White as she greets me at the door.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s not so bad.”

This throws me off balance. She’s not following the script. Heather is wearing a wool vest and chunky glasses. She is eighty years old, but her mind is nimble and sharp, and she says she feels like she’s thirty-five. Heather hails from a proud British military family. Her father was Winston Churchill’s commanding officer when the two served in India. Heather herself received a medal when, as a thirteen- year-old bicycle courier, she was wounded by shrapnel during World War II.

She invites me inside, shooing Lizzie, her bull terrier. She shows me to a sitting room, which is filled with drawings of bull terriers and lots of books: an Indian cookbook, a biography of Jane Austen, an English translation of the Koran. Heather White is a woman of many surprises.

Heather has spent most of her life in Slough, but like Geoffrey she has a few reservations about the place, which she expresses in classic English understatement.

“Slough is crap. Total crap. I hate it.”

Heather doesn’t like what’s happened to Slough in recent years. Doesn’t like the housing projects. Doesn’t like the traffic. Doesn’t like the shopping malls. Doesn’t like the Asians, except for her neighbors, who are from Pakistan and are very nice.

I point to a photo of a man on the wall. As I suspect, it’s Heather’s husband. He died several years ago, she says, and was “a real boffin.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say.

Heather looks at me like I’m daft. A boffin, it turns out, is what Brits call a clever inventor. Indeed, he was a clever man in many ways. When he and Heather were courting, he wrote her love letters in ancient Greek. She had to find a friend to translate.

Heather White is happy, though I suspect she was happy before the happiness experts descended on Slough. Not coincidentally, Heather White is a nurse, one of the professions that the University of Chicago researchers found to be among the happiest. Technically, Heather’s retired, but she’s always going to the hospital to help out with one thing or another. Heather is needed. Heather looks forward to Monday morning.

Heather had never heard of “the science of happiness”

before the producers of Making Slough Happy approached her. She decided to try it on a lark. Heather thought the experiment was fine but wonders why they didn’t include exercises involving dogs and gardens, the two pillars of English happiness. Especially dogs. “You take dogs into the hospital, and the patients heal better. I’ve seen it. Dogs are the key to happiness.”

One exercise she especially enjoyed was photography. Her assignment was to photograph the faces of Slough, photos that would eventually be assembled into a giant mural and displayed on High Street. Heather had hardly taken a photo in her life. But she’s a fast learner and, it turns out, quite a good photographer. Only one problem: The people of Slough don’t smile and don’t like having their pictures taken. So Heather pointed her camera downward and photographed manhole covers instead. Snap, snap. It’s amazing how many different manhole covers there are. Snap. Each one is different, like snowflakes. Only not as beautiful. Heavier, too.

One of her fellow participants lent Heather a book about positive psychology. It was so “typically American,” she says. So sugary. Heather White takes her tea and her life straight up, no sugar.

“Do you ever feel down, Heather?”

“Oh, yes, of course. If I do, I just have a good moan and get on with it.”

Ahh, a good moan. That’s the thing about the Brits. They don’t moan or whine or complain. Until they do. Then get out of the way.

Britain is a great place for grumps like myself. There are lots of fellow grumps to hang out with. There are books for grumps and even a TV series. It’s called Grumpy Old Men and it’s hugely popular.

I picked up the companion book to Grumpy Old Men and flipped to the foreword, written by a grump named Arthur Smith. He begins by observing that “life is shit organized by bastards.” Then he gets negative.

Arthur, like most Brits, I suspect, derives a perverse pleasure from his grumpiness. How else to read this description of how he feels in midmoan? “As I railed on and on, I became increasingly energized and excited by my own misery and misanthropy until I reached a kind of orgasm of negativity.” Wow. Now that is grumpiness par excellence. He’s taken Hilmar the Happy Heathen’s “enjoyment of misery” to a whole new level. The Brits don’t merely enjoy misery, they get off on it.

I can relate. After all, my last name is pronounced “whiner,” and I do my best to live up to the name. I have the embarrassing tendency, for instance, to sigh heavily. I do this constantly, while writing, driving, and even in meetings. People assume I am bored or agitated, but that’s usually not true. It’s just my way of relieving the grumpy pressure that has built up inside of me. A good sigh, like a good moan, is a self-correcting mechanism. But here in Britain, land of the grumps, I am out of my league. Once uncorked, British grumps are a force of nature, remarkable for, if nothing else, their sheer staying power.

Like me, Heather White is an amateur grump. She’ll just moan for a few minutes then return to her natural state of contentment. She counts her blessings: her dog, her garden, her friends. And now a degree of fame, since the program aired. Heather has no desire for riches, though. She wouldn’t know what to do with all that money. “I’ve seen plenty of people with money who are miserable. It’s people, not money, that make you happy. Dogs, too.”

Heather offers to drive me back to my hotel. I’m fastening my seat belt when she picks up on my trepidation. “You’re not afraid of my driving, are you?”

“No,” I lie.

She turns out to be a darned good driver, skillfully navigating the snow-covered roads while quietly humming to herself. At that moment, I realize that Heather White is latently happy.

I’ve arranged to meet Richard Hill in front of a Chinese restaurant. From a block away, I can tell that he is not well. He’s walking slowly, cautiously. He’s stooped over and pale, though he’s only in his early fifties. As I get closer, I can make out his crooked, yellow teeth.

We sit down at a coffee shop, and Richard orders a huge cup of cappuccino. It’s more of a bowl, really, a very large bowl. The kind of beverage one should not drink without a life preserver.

Richard is unloading three packets of sugar into his cappuccino and telling me how, at the age of thirty, he had his first heart attack. It wasn’t far from here. He was at a friend’s house, watching TV, when the pain hit like a tsunami. He’s had two more heart attacks since. Richard suffers from severe angina. His body produces too much cholesterol. Exercise and diet don’t help. He’s too sick to work. He’s had two bypass operations and takes drugs to control the condition, but he knows that his life is more precarious than most.

“I could drop dead at any moment,” he tells me, matter-of- factly, as he pours yet another packet of sugar into his cappuccino.

I’m just sitting there, wishing I had signed up for that CPR course at the Red Cross, when Richard, a Welshman, explains how he landed in Slough. He was recuperating from that first heart attack when he decided he quite liked Slough and would call it home. “A brilliant town,” he says, and he means it. It’s multicultural, and Richard figures that’s a good thing. He can go to India or Pakistan or Poland without ever leaving Slough.

Richard caught wind of Making Slough Happy and couldn’t resist. He considers himself reasonably happy, but here was a chance to make himself even happier—for free —and appear on television, to boot. What’s not to like? Richard found the happiness manifesto a bit sappy at first, but it’s grown on him. Some eighteen months since the experiment ended, he still turns to it regularly, even if just for obvious things, he says, such as counting your blessings and being grateful for five things every day.

I can’t imagine what this sickly, unemployed man can be grateful for, so I ask.

“That I’m still alive. That’s the big one. That I didn’t have a heart attack in the middle of the night and die. It’s not a theoretical fear. I have come close to death. It’s something you have to experience. It’s not an intellectual thing.”

“But your health problems, they must make you less happy.”

“No, they’ve made me happier.” “Happier?”

“Yes. Let me put it this way. When was the last time you had your heart checked?”

The question makes me nervous. It happens to be my birthday, and I’m now comfortably (if that’s the word) in the heart-attack years.

“My two-year-old daughter checked my heart with her toy stethoscope, does that count?”

“No. When is the last time you had an angiogram?” “What’s an angiogram?”

“The point is you don’t know the condition of your heart while I know exactly the condition of my heart. I know it’s in reasonably good working order, even though I get chest pains and everything. I could pack up, but so could anyone else. I went through a phase where I lost all my ambitions because of my heart problems, and I couldn’t be inspired to do anything because I could drop dead tomorrow. Then my cousin died suddenly, and he had been perfectly healthy. Fifty-one years old. A very athletic farmer. And I got to thinking, yeah, I could drop dead, but so could anybody else. At least I know the condition of one of my vital organs.”

“But aren’t you afraid of dying?”

“No. I’m afraid of a painful illness that leads to death. But I’m not afraid of dying of a heart attack. I’ve come close a couple of times and if that’s what dying is like, that’s okay with me.”

I steer the conversation back toward the Making Slough Happy experiment, but death continues to tail us. Richard tells me that the graveyard therapy was a highlight for him. He wandered around the cemetery, as instructed, and found a tombstone for a boy who was four years old. “And I got to thinking, it’s tragic for the people left behind, but that boy had no sense of his own mortality, so, providing he didn’t suffer, he had a wonderful life, I’m sure.”

Richard agrees with my theory that British culture hinders happiness. The most obvious manifestation is the lack of hugging. The British don’t even hug their own mothers. Once, when he was ten years old, Richard visited Canada and discovered a brave new world of hugging. He started giving his mom a hug every time he saw her. Hugging, he says, “really lifts your spirits.”

I present Richard with a proposition. If I give him five years and fifty million dollars and asked him to make Slough happy—really happy, not television happy—what would he do?

“Well, you need to point out to people that you don’t need the money. Just put the happiness manifesto into action.

Chat with someone who is down. Appreciate the moment.

That’s it. Like this cappuccino. If it was bad, we’d be quick to complain. But if it was excellent, if it exceeded our expectations, would we write and compliment the café? No, we wouldn’t.”

Richard has finished his cappuccino, which was excellent, by the way. We step outside. The sky is gray. It looks like another cloudy day to me. But Richard Hill, signatory to the happiness manifesto, a man hovering between life and death, looks up at the sky, spots patches of blue, and declares it a partly sunny day.

Toothpaste or toilet paper? That was the grim choice facing Veronica Puglia. She was recently divorced, living on the dole, and had only enough money for one of those items. Which would it be: toothpaste or toilet paper? I’ll tell you later. First, more about Veronica. She’s the daughter of Polish immigrants. Her maiden name means “nutty center” in Polish, a fact she evidently takes pride in. One day, one of her daughters handed her a flyer for Making Slough Happy. They were looking for volunteers. Veronica was intrigued. She wondered if such a thing was possible, to make an entire town happier. She wouldn’t mind being a bit happier herself.

It worked. The experiment made her happier, but it wasn’t the science of happiness that did it. No therapeutic breakthrough, no clap-of-thunder revelation. It was old- fashioned socializing. Getting out and meeting people.

Veronica was one of the volunteers who met with the lottery winner. She doesn’t buy the research about lotteries and happiness and hedonic adaptation. Show her the money, she says. Others may squander their winnings, but she would know what to do with the millions. She would be happy. Winning would give her choices, and choices are good, Veronica reckons. Well, most choices. Not between toothpaste or toilet paper, but as a lottery winner, that’s one choice she would never have to make again. If she won, she’d open a pub, she tells me and, yes, I can see it. Veronica would make an excellent publican. The kind that makes you feel like the pub is a second home.

Veronica’s life, her life circumstances to be more precise, have grown worse since the experiment ended. She was laid off from her job teaching résumé writing at a local school, so she’s back on the dole, watching every pence, barely making ends meet. Life is bloody tough, she tells me.

“So, Veronica,” I ask, gingerly, “how happy are you these days? On a scale of one to ten.”

“A six,” she says, but I can tell she’s not satisfied with her answer. She’s cogitating.

“No, that’s not right. I only said that because that’s what I think I should be, given my life situation, being on the dole and divorced and all. But, actually, I’m an eight. No, an 8.5.

Yes, that’s what I am. An 8.5.” She has her health and two beautiful daughters. And every Monday night, she and a few of the Slough fifty meet down at the Red Lion Pub for quiz night.

So what was it: toothpaste or toilet paper? Veronica figures there are two types of people in the world: Toothpaste People and Toilet Paper People. Veronica? She’s a Toothpaste Person. You can always find a stand-in for toilet paper—paper napkins, for instance. But not toothpaste. Toothpaste, unlike toilet paper, does more than perform a necessary function. It also makes your mouth feel good, makes you feel good. Yes, Veronica is a Toothpaste Person.

Dusk is settling over Slough. I’m walking back to my hotel. I decide to stop at a church cemetery and try a little graveyard therapy. I trudge through the slushy, unkempt grounds, stopping at each tombstone and saying each name aloud. For me, something isn’t real unless I say it aloud. A thirteen-year-old boy. An eighty-four-year-old man. A nineteen-year-old girl. I know this is supposed to make me feel lucky to be alive, but I can’t muster that sentiment. I’m cold and tired and feel silly standing in a cemetery, talking to myself.

Then I come across the gravestone for one Ellen Greenway, who died on the twenty-fifth of March, 1914. She was exactly my age when she passed away. I can relate to Ellen. She is not an abstraction. Right there, standing amid the slush and weeds, shivering from the cold, I make a promise to myself: I will remember that every day from this moment on is gravy. Pure, fat-laden, creamy, heart-attack- inducing gravy.

The TV experiment was fine, but how, I wonder, would we go about really making Slough—or any place else— happier? Is it simply a matter of eliminating problems? Reduce crime, get rid of those ugly housing projects, clean up air pollution, and happiness will flow like warm beer from the tap? George Orwell was skeptical of this approach: “Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has a toothache and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having a toothache.”

He’s right. Surely, happiness is not merely “the absence of suffering,” as that über-pessimist Schopenhauer believed, but the presence of something. But what? And can you make places change or, like the old joke about psychiatrists and lightbulbs, does the place have to want to change first?

In Slough, I can’t avoid the facts. The viral theory of happiness never took hold. The Slough fifty may have learned a thing or two about happiness, but the message never spread very far. Does that mean that the viral theory is flawed? I don’t think so. It’s simply a matter of numbers. Plant enough happiness seeds—people like Richard Hill and Heather White and Veronica Puglia—and eventually the laws of exponential growth kick in. A tipping point is reached, and happiness, I believe, will spread like a California brush fire.

So what to do in the meantime? I suppose we continue planting seeds. Besides, it is the planting that matters, not the harvest. As many philosophers have noted, happiness is a by-product. Happiness is, as Nathaniel Hawthorne observed, the butterfly that alights on our shoulder, unbidden.

So, instead of actively trying to make places, or people, happier, perhaps we’d be better off heeding the advice of Canadian author Robertson Davies: “If you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.”

Put that way, I see frumpy old Slough in a whole new light. It is no longer a much-maligned Berkshire town, the butt of jokes, but rather a treasure trove of unhappiness, just waiting to be plucked.