We have a tendency to record only the information we deem important or significant, and because of that, much of the minutiae of everyday life are lost when a generation dies and the one that comes after does not remember.

Yet it is the little things, the details and the trivia, which have a fascination quite apart from the momentous events that landmark history. If no one sees fit to put these details down on paper, they are lost for good when all who experienced them are dead. I had thought that men taking out birds in little cages under their arm, for a visit to the neighbourhood bar or coffee-house, was something typically southern Mediterranean, because it still goes on, though very rarely now, in our part of the world. Yet it is not. It was a common habit in – who would have thought it? – north London. A woman called Helen Day has transcribed and had published in England the recollections of her grandfather (London Born: A Memoir of a Forgotten City), a north Londoner called Sidney Day, who was born in 1912. Among them is this gem: “Nearly everybody who went to the Brookefield (pub) on a Sunday took a bird in a little carrying-cage … Every man put his bird up on the shelf that ran right the way along the bar. The bar was filled with birds fluttering and singing.” It could have been Haz-Zebbug in the 1940s, except for the name of the bar, which in Malta would have been the King George or the Queen Mary.

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An English economist called Richard Layard has written a book called Happiness, in which he tries to set out the recipe that has proved as elusive as that for curing cancer or making gold from base metal: how to be happy. Happiness is deemed so important to humanity that the Americans even wrote its pursuit into their Constitution, perhaps haunted by the memory of the sheer, unutterable misery from which they and their forebears had fled, in the less salubrious parts of Europe.

Sadly, or perhaps, happily, Layard doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. A stable and unproblematic family life, friends, good health, a successful and enjoyable career and financial security contribute most to our happiness. What a surprise. Remove just one of those from the equation, though – good health, for example, or financial security – or add its opposite, like a problematic family or a boring, tedious job – and the happiness train is derailed. A blighted marriage, unemployment, illness, boredom, loneliness and bereavement, Layard tells us, usually cause unhappiness. Nothing new there; nothing we couldn’t have guessed at, even if so many of us didn’t know all this from direct experience.

The surprise is that there are people blessed enough to have all the factors that make for happiness. Ah, but then they have to contend with something else, the corrosive acid of envy, and it is a rare form of happiness that is strong enough to withstand the constant drip-drip of jealousy and the relentless attempts at assailing it that are made by the envious, who seek to destroy what they cannot have for themselves, or to obtain happiness by taking it away from others. At least Layard has the decency to point out that money may not buy happiness, but it certainly helps. Even the happiness wrought by blissful love is somewhat eroded by penury without end. He makes a fundamental mistake, though – that of comparing the past with the present, without making sure that all things are equal. It is a mistake made by many others when they choose to look at the past through a misty haze of rose-tinted nostalgia, and say, “Oh, things were so much better then.” They weren’t, of course. There’s no doubt that things are very much better now, for the vast majority of people, in the developed world at least.

Layard writes that according to research, depression, alcoholism and suicide have risen considerably over the past few generations, despite higher incomes and a much better standard of living. Yet he doesn’t use the proper basis for comparison, that of like with like. In the past, the suicide of a family member was a cause of shame, so doctors and coroners would put it down as an accidental death or a death by misadventure. They do not do that now, not just because the shame associated with suicide has gone, but because medical ethics and the law prevent it. We have no way of knowing that there are more alcoholics now than there were “in the past”, whatever and whenever that period may be. Certainly, London in the late 18th century was a sink-pit of gin-addicts lying in the gutter. If anything, matters have improved in this respect, rather than the opposite. If we go on statistics relating to death through cirrhosis of the liver, then the obvious fact cannot be avoided: with improved sanitary conditions and health care, even alcoholics are living long enough to die of cirrhosis, rather than being hauled away by the Grim Reaper at 30 or 40, because of some illness that is easily curable now, or a dangerous one that has been rendered extinct, or even by being used as cannon fodder for their warring nations.

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Happiness is precious precisely because it comes to us in fleeting flashes. It seems to me that there is nothing particularly desirable in being happy all the time. Those who are relentlessly happy are incredibly tedious to others, even if they do take such great delight in themselves. Rather than having something more than the rest of us do, they come across as having something less: a screw or two up there, perhaps, hence the mythical ‘happy moron’. The perennially bright and breezy ‘let’s look on the positive side’ Polly-Annas grate against life. At school, they were the ones that nuns and other figures of authority liked very much, which naturally made all others suspicious of them. The Always Happies seem somehow unreal and detached from reality, as though they are permanently hooked on Prozac or something more sinister. And in their inability or unwillingness to understand that some situations in life do call for unhappiness and grief – that, indeed, unhappiness and grief are the normal and correct human responses – they can seem hard and uncaring, and even a bit psychopathic. Seeing the profound serenity in the photographed eyes of Osama bin Laden (he could have been a 1970s yogi or guru, the sort that tempted bored middle-class women to run off to ashrams, chant and eat vegetables) I get the feeling that he is a very happy man.

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It doesn’t take much to uncover the secret of permanent happiness. It is this: you have to be very, very shallow, and you must not allow yourself to become emotionally involved in anything at all; just skim over the surface of life. It is strange but true that the ever-present happiness of those who skip through their days is a feeling wrought by the near-absence of emotional involvement with those around them. They are disengaged from life, and from all the routine upsets, grief and sadness that it inevitably brings. How much better it is, then, to settle for the other kind of happiness – the one that comes in brief surges, and which is so much better appreciated because of it, in the same way that a beautiful and unexpected present is.

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The ceaseless ranting about when human life begins makes happiness very difficult to find these days. The way our politicians and their appointed committees are chuntering on, you would imagine that whether life begins at conception is something that has never been debated before, anywhere in the world at any point in history, and that it is now up to them to decide for the rest of humanity and for all time. Malta is going to set an example to the rest of the world.

If it were not so fascinating, in the way that a really bad horror film starring Paris Hilton and plenty of hot wax is fascinating, then it would be embarrassing. Worse still are the attempts being made to jump through Catholic hoops while still keeping content the baby manufactories and those who wish to keep on using them (as they have every right to do). If you bend over backwards far enough, you’ll find your head dipped in hypocrisy, and we’re getting dangerously close to that. Listen to this, for instance. Tests for congenital disorders will be allowed to take place on eggs fertilised in the laboratory, before they are implanted in the woman’s body, so that if a congenital disorder is present, the fertilised egg may be discarded. But similar tests will not be allowed on the eggs that have been fertilised through the time-honoured method of a good roll in the sack, because they are – oh dear – already inside the woman’s body and discarding them means abortion.

There’s another big battle of contradictions up ahead, too. The Bioethics Consultative Committee, which was appointed by the government, has agreed (presumably, while the rest of the world waited with bated breath) that human life starts at between 14 and 24 hours from when the sperm penetrates the egg. If this definition is accepted by our parliament, it will no longer be possible for the government to uphold its ban on the importation and sale of the so-called ‘morning after’ pill, which works by causing the woman’s body to reject the egg within just a few hours of penetration by the sperm, hence this pill’s common name.

There’s one thing that can be said for the clever people who will be deciding all this for the rest of us not-so-clever ones: they’re going to be far from happy. Rather them than me.