Are we in danger of forgetting the simple joy of life?

EDINBURGH, Bath, Chichester, Stamford, Harrogate, Oxford and Cambridge are, according to a survey by one Sunday paper, among the nicest places in Britain to live.

Or, as someone has since put it, happiness comes down to living amid lots of stately Georgian or Victorian architecture – and close to a Waitrose.

This certainly touches on three important truths. For one, the beauty of the built environment around us greatly influences our wellbeing. For another, a felt sense of belonging, of community, greatly enriches life.

And there is also something very special about living somewhere with good shops and most amenities within convenient walking distance. That, in my experiences, trumps other supposed ideals such as privacy and ravishing views.

I have twice tried living – with gorgeous outlook through the windows – in remote and windswept hamlets, and found I cannot stand it. It is not just the inconvenience of being unable to walk down to the corner-shop every day for the Daily Mail and a morning roll; it is the creepy sense of exposure and anomie.

By contrast, I spent a very happy decade in Tarbert, Harris. You might not think there is very much to Tarbert, but it is a pleasant community with several friendly shops, pleasant walks and a gurgling burn. There are charming views, whether out over East Loch Tarbert and its myriad islands to distant Skye, or over the village’s own intriguing roofscape – especially of a still, winter evening as the sky fades to violet and the first aromatic peat-fires are lit.

IF you think of all the charming and sought-after places to live in our cities – Finnieston and Hyndland in Glasgow, say; or Colinton, Marchmont, Morningside and Stockbridge in Edinburgh – you realise these, too, are effectively villages.

A given manor where, after a few years, you recognise most faces; where the newsagent knows your name and you come to enjoy the daily round, the passing of the seasons and quiet little endeavours for decency all around you, be it the little Salvation Army brassensemble that, every December, moves about Edinburgh’s suburbs playing Christmas carols or the be-kilted lads of the 4th Braid Scout Group who have a seasonal tradition of packing your bags at Morningside’s supermarket.

There is a still richer sense of community in the Hebrides, of course, when people know if you are ill and care when you die and where, in solemn procession from the church, we give everyone a Churchilllike burial. Or the daffy local traditions everywhere, from the Burning of the Clavie at Burghead, the Ridings in the Borders or the perspiring annual labours of the Burry Man in South Queensferry.

There is also a curious contentment, and it is an undoubted advantage of attaining hale middle-age, in having known a given locale for 30 or 40 years.

It can be wistful. I can still walk up the long street of my mother’s native village and reel off the Gaelic patronymic of each home – taigh Mhurdaig, taigh Mhorgain, taigh a’ Phiobair, taigh Didig – but in the knowledge that, while their houses yet stand, these redoubtable personalities of my childhood now sleep in the ancient graveyard by the rumbling Atlantic.

But it can also be smug. Since my parents settled in the Morningside district in 1982, I have come to know every last cobble and acquainted myself thoroughly with the history of the place.

I know where secret underground burns babble below the road; or the tenement where Dame Muriel Spark grew up. I could direct you to the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson’s nanny, or to two inset stones on one busy street where, on January 25, 1815, two wretched Irish highwaymen were – and with great relish – publicly hanged.

We are constantly being told what happiness is. We are bombarded on a daily basis and from all sides with advertising exhorting us, in one form or another, to buy it. Happiness, we are generally brainwashed into thinking, necessitates buying a great deal of stuff, travelling regularly to all sorts of places round the world, and achieving success, power and eminence.

But one can lead a most contented and serene life without enjoying a high income, frequent trips abroad, or a position of importance. People talk of ‘mindfulness’, but the essentials are – as far as you can – to live in the moment rather than brooding darkly over the past (easy as it is for a Highlander) or gazing apprehensively to the future (naturally as that comes to a Calvinist) – and staying keenly aware of the world around you. That is a gift that many today sacrifice without realising it. I thoroughly enjoy public transport because I like gazing out of the window on the train or down on passers-by from the top deck of a bus.

YET everywhere I see people quite absorbed in laptops or mobiles or ‘devices’, scrolling through SnapChat or whatever and quite unaware that, say, our train for Glasgow Queen Street has just passed a little group of roe deer or a swan making magnificent take-off from its Lanarkshire lochan.

It is also extraordinary to see how many folk roam our streets wearing headphones, caught up in a solipsistic little bubble and oblivious to real sounds – and real life – around them.

You even see cyclists doing it, ignoring the safety implications of such an extraordinary lifestyle choice: not just living, but to the profit of Spotify, consuming.

Happiness might indeed be a rare treat, a slap-up meal in a top restaurants with someone special. But it might as well be walking them home with a bag of chips. Or a couple of hours one afternoon, when the wind blows warm and moist, fishing at the loch down the road in hope of a big trout.

It may be the first minutes of your morning, sitting in the garden with an enthralling book and a huge mug of Earl Grey.

Or in the kitchen of an early evening, making a tasty meal for your family with Radio 4 purring in the background, or walking the dogs through crisp and frosty woods, or quietly writing, stamping and posting a real old-fashioned letter to the primary teacher with whom you have never lost touch.

It is the pleasure of knowing your neighbours’ names – and those of their dogs; the frisson of quiet joy when you learn of an engagement or a forthcoming baby; the cheeky wit of a child or the sparkling vitality of someone very old.

The effort someone has put into a shop display or the free samples handed out by the cheesemonger, or even the jolting amusement of a moment that reminds you how much Scotland has changed – like the two youths who passed me in Glasgow a few weeks back, unselfconsciously hand in hand and attracting not the slightest attention.

And perhaps most of all – and it grows with age – the sense of life itself as a gift, denied to many, and one day inevitably to be taken from us.

Not to mention Sainsbury’s. As the late Alan Coren deliciously observed, it keeps the riff-raff out of Waitrose.