100 YEARS OLD AND STILL HAPPY AND UNWORRIED...

AYOUNG fellow just rang and told me that we were very sad in January. I told him that he may have been very sad but I certainly wasn’t and I was about to put the phone down when he insisted that according to a survey of greetings cards, the nation hit a new peak of sadness in January. I became mildly intrigued and encouraged him to explain his methodology.

“Well,” he said, “it is the result of a survey by Clintons greetings cards. Excluding the standard birthday and Christmas cards and the like, we’ve looked at monthly sales of cards that express a specific emotion. This has enabled us to draw up a monthly National Emotion Index to measure how the mood of the country varies throughout the year. It clearly shows that sadness peaked in January.”

“Send it to me,” I said. “I shall peruse it with great interest.”

A spreadsheet arrived a few minutes later which indeed recorded a very high level of sadness in January. Of all cards expressing a particular emotion in the greeting, 33 per cent registered sadness in January compared with a monthly average of only eight per cent for the six previous months. I rang the young fellow back immediately.

“Your chart,” I said, “measures Sadness, Worry, Compassion, Gratitude, Happiness and Excitement but how did you arrive at your classifications?”

“To take Sadness as an example,” he explained, “that comprised cards using the word ‘sorry’ in a sad context.”

“So you’d include ‘Sorry to hear your dog was run over,’ or ‘Sorry you’ve had a vasectomy,’” I said. “Stuff like that.”

“I don’t think we do either of those cards,” he said, “but I agree those particular sentiments would probably qualify as sad.”

“Whereas ‘Congratulations on your vasectomy!’ would not,” I said, seeking further clarification.

“If it had an exclamation mark at the end, it would probably fall under Excitement,” he agreed. “Unlike the dog which probably fell under a car.”

“I ask because I am mystified by that figure of 33 per cent for Sad cards in January,” I said. “Do you think we send all our Happy cards at Christmas and only had the Sad ones left? Or is it something to do with the fact that 33 per cent of women say they drink alcohol at least once a week and 33 per cent of people are dissatisfied with social care?

“Are they perhaps the ones receiving the Sad cards because they disgraced themselves at Christmas parties and then complained about the level of social care they received for the self-inflicted damage caused by their alcoholism? Do you do a ‘Sorry to hear you got plastered again,’ card?”

“That’s another one we don’t do,” he said, “but thank you for the idea. That ‘thank you’ incidentally, was Gratitude, which peaked at 34 per cent in July.”

“That makes sense,” I said, “for 66 per cent of people have never tried lobster. I guess it’s the other 34 per cent who are sending out the ‘Thank you for the lobster’ greetings cards.”

When the call was over, I promptly sent him a “Congratulations on the bewilderingly silly survey” card.