Go on: buy a tomato plant, not a frock

My fiancé is engrossed in a book called Happiness by the economist Richard Layard, from which he reads aloud pertinent statistics. ‘People are happiest in the year they get married,’ he will lugubriously announce, ‘and after that it’s downhill all the way.’ Or: ‘Having children does make you happy, but only for two years.’ Or, plangently, as the evening light begins to fade: ‘Most people are happiest at the end of the day.’

His normal bedtime reading is The Lawn Expert by D.G. Hessayon which, it seems to me, has a rather more uplifting effect on his mood. But the study of happiness is very au courant, having recently been upgraded to a political science. New quangos such as the Whitehall Wellbeing Working Group have sprung up to advise the government on how to build a more cheerful nation. Defra is compiling an ‘index of wellbeing’ by which to measure Britain’s state of mind.

The auguries are not good: a survey commissioned for BBC2’s new series The Happiness Formula found that we British are considerably grumpier than we were in the 1950s, despite being three times richer. The proportion of people describing themselves as ‘very happy’ has fallen from 52 per cent in 1957 to just 36 per cent today. It’s the same story across the developed world: once people have attained a comfortable standard of living, extra wealth does not make them any happier. Indeed, it may even be counterproductive.

Capitalism encourages us to compete unnecessarily against each other, working longer hours in order to afford bigger, shinier status symbols than our neighbour. Advertising exacerbates the situation, coaxing us to buy things that — though they might satisfy a temporary lust — do nothing for the long-term nourishment of the soul. To be truly content, say the experts, we should invest less in treats and trinkets, and more in human relations.

But the accumulation of stuff is a hard habit to break. Almost every day I find my fingers twitching towards my purse, seized by the urgent desire to buy a polka-dot tablecloth or a crackle-glaze serving bowl. The consumer impulse is extraordinarily strong; it feels, at the time, much more like need than want. For the susceptible, like me, each trip to the shops is fraught with promise. If I can just find the perfect pair of red stilettos, everything else will fall into place; men will stagger back in awe as I sashay past, friends will redouble their admiration, job offers will flutter about me like confetti.

It is the vertiginous return to reality (my shoes are nice, but nothing’s changed) that makes consumerism such an unsatisfactory experience. And yet I don’t think we should give up on retail therapy altogether. It is possible to buy happiness; you just have to know where to shop.

Two years ago, for instance, I bought a pair of shoes that really did change my life. I had recently begun, after decades of determined indolence, to explore the benefits of physical activity. I had taken up swimming to combat my insomnia, and hired a tutor I found on the internet to teach me how to ride a bicycle (humiliating at first, but ultimately another example of money well spent). Now it was time to face the final frontier: the country walk.

My mother says I loathed walking from the moment I first learnt to do it. When she tried putting reins on me and dragging me to the shops, I simply lifted up my feet and dangled from her arm like a handbag. This remained my principled position until I met the man with whom I now plan to live in steadily diminishing marital bliss. He liked walking; worse, he was determined that I should, too.

To all my objections — I’m too clumsy, it’s too tiring, I hate mud, I’m scared of slippery slopes — he replied that a good pair of walking boots would sort me out. And so they have. They cost a fortune and took the best part of an afternoon to buy (purveyors of walking boots take their job pleasingly seriously: they make you march up and down imaginary hills while peering closely at your ankles) but they have given me more satisfaction than a lifetime of red stilettos.

It’s not just the astonishing discovery that I can get to the top of a Brecon Beacon; it’s the feeling of competence along the way. If your previous experience of the country walk is sliding backwards down a muddy slope in a pair of tennis shoes while your companions disappear over the horizon, there is a giddying amount of pleasure to be derived from a thick sole and a firm tread. Crunching over scree and ploughing through mud, I find myself chortling with private glee. ‘Look at that ankle-support! See how I stay upright!’

This, I have since realised, is what distinguishes the really good purchase — the gift that keeps on giving. Most of the time, when we shop, we are too beguiled by appearance. Clothes, cosmetics and tasteful home furnishings all hold out the promise of transformation, but deliver merely window-dressing for the same old life. Only when you buy something that genuinely expands your field of experience, however modestly, can satisfaction be guaranteed.

The best present I have bought for years was a 99p packet of lettuce seeds. My fiancé sprinkled half of them into an empty flowerbed last spring, and we watched in triumph as they sprouted into little green seedlings. Who would have thought it? We can grow our own food! The pleasure of munching on home-grown salad kept us on a gentle high all summer.

We are not the first to have rediscovered the restorative powers of the vegetable patch. This year all the major seed companies have reported bigger sales in vegetables than in flowers — the first time that has happened since the end of the second world war. In a post-industrial, post-agricultural age, when the only thing most of us know how to make with our hands is a rude gesture, there is something profoundly cheering about the discovery that you can, literally, feed yourself.

If the government is determined to make us happy through central command, so be it. While we wait for the euphoria to kick in, there is much that can be done through judicious consumerism. Buy a tomato plant instead of a frock, a bicycle instead of a new sofa. And read The Lawn Expert: it’s so much jollier than Happiness.

Jemima Lewis is a contributing editor of The Spectator.