Today, a break from politics for some indispensable life advice. What should we do, people never ask me, to live a happy life?

In his celebrated work, The Path to Rome, Hilaire Belloc enumerated a number of activities in which he believed people needed to engage in order to be “reasonably happy”.

These activities, he suggested, were things that “the human race has done for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years”, and were so “buried right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to do [them] if we are to be fairly happy”.

He observed: “This is a matter of such moment that I am astonished people hear of it so little.”

The same thought, I have to say, occurs to me regularly when writing this column.

Anyway, what did Belloc have in mind?

“One should from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark; one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one’s food – and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and one should sing in chorus.”

OK, maybe a trigger warning might have been advisable, at least in respect of the dancing. Nonetheless, you’ll agree that all this seems eminently sensible. “For all these things,” he noted, “man has done since God put him into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul.”

Belloc went on to add that someone else had suggested to him that to these should be added “that every man should do a little work with his hands”. And,........

© The Irish Times