Just this last Easter Weekend, I went for a walk in Regent’s Park early morning – and as the sun beat down on me walking through gorgeously designed and tended gardens, I felt so lucky to be alive and living in such a beautiful city with such a beautiful park on such a beautiful day. It reminded me that we should be deeply blessed (weather aside!) to live in this country – one of the very richest in world, with a fine tradition of decency and humanity and kept free of many of the large-scale tragedies (natural and man-made) that have scarred so many other countries in the last few decades.
So why then are the joys of life often apparently in such short supply? It is not just the media – much though they love painting a picture of grim catastrophe where everything we eat and touch will kill us, and even if it doesn’t there is a cast of other woes just waiting in the wings.
I’m currently slowly writing- or more accurately trying to write – a chapter for a book. My thesis is that we live our lives surrounded by the unattainable- the ‘must haves’ of how our lives should be, what we should do, think, eat, be and aspire too – all of which leaves us meandering along life’s path, whichever path we are on, feeling vaguely disappointed in our achievements or our lack of them and feeling perpetually disappointed or deprived. Even in this age of unparalleled wealth in our country – it doesn’t protect us from a perpetual feeling that if we only had X or did Y, our lives would be so much better.
So how – in this world that has moved on from those ‘old-fashioned’ values – can we create structures or environment that value our human good qualities more and place less importance on wealth or status?
And what – if any – role is there for government and public bodies in all this? This is tricky territory to tread in as one false slip of the sentence and you open yourself up to pastiche as wanting a Ministry of Fun and state-regulated force-fed humour courses with every meal. Indeed, David Cameron’s recent call to "let sunshine win the day" certainly did seem to me rather risible. (Does he think he will be running against a "more rain now" Prime Minster at the next election? On the other hand, if it is Gordon Brown…!)
But with all that said and all the caveats deployed – there are certainly many things government and public bodies can do to make us sad or angry, so should their role be to minimise such actions or are there more positive steps that can be taken too? In the grand sweep of policy, there are obvious big picture items – such as tackling poverty, reducing social exclusion and cutting crime.
All help remove real causes of misery. But they are not the whole story – just think of the number of times people say things along the lines of, "we may have been poor, but at least we were happy…" So I am interested too in the smaller scale measures.
Take one example: the question of how engaged someone is with their neighbours has huge knock-on effects on their participation in society, happiness and even health. Government can hardly order people to talk to or like their neighbours, but at the micro-scale why about councils doing more to help and encourage the organisation of street parties so people get to know each other? Lots of streets already do have their own street parties – and it does create neighbourlyness and bon homie. Perhaps an annual street party week to encourage all those who mutter about how nice it would be to know the people in their street to actually get round to it? Or perhaps councils should be doing more to help online communities emerge in their areas, through measures like providing easy to use and free website and online discussion forums so that anyone can within a few minutes set-up an online community for their street or neighbourhood – and of course click a link to print off some flyers to then distribute to their neighbours?
As the chapter still needs writing – do let me have your thoughts. Just drop me an email or comment on my blog.
(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2007
Lynne Featherstone 