Pico Iyer

really care about. Not being able to get online in that hill-station guesthouse is a frustration — until you realise it’s a rare chance to forget about Donald Trump for 10 days.

Happiness is not the same as excitement or exhilaration, let alone ecstasy; one of the happiest moments I can remember was on a sunlit, silent morning in Havana when I walked along the great seaside corniche, the Malecon, and saw nothing much at all.

Many of my other happiest memories — watching the city come to life every morning at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, rattling along a deserted coastline in a bus; just sitting in a garden on a warm summer evening in my hometown of Oxford — have been the opposite of extraordinary or life changing.

They’ve simply reminded me how much is in the ordinary, if you’re settled enough to see it. Happiness is not something you look for, but what emerges when the looking ends.

It’s fitting that the first moment of travel happiness I recall comes from Bhutan. It was this remote Himalayan kingdom that gave us the notion of “Gross National Happiness” four decades ago, reminding us that the richest man in the world is a beggar of sorts if he’s impatient