When I was young and pretentious (or more pretentious than now), I used to think glumness was a mark of virtue. If friends were guffawing at a boorish joke I’d affect a cool stance of moral superiority. If people were getting carried away over a match I’d mutter something supercilious about sport being opium for the masses.

Chin-stroking, humourless detachment was the right sort of posture to adopt when faced with popular entertainment. So I had been taught by fashionable intellectuals like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and above all Noam Chomsky, that high priest of anti-establishmentarianism who would have us believe that shows like The Great British Bake Off are designed to distract us from the evils of the military-industrial complex.

Happiness, I’d been conditioned to accept, was a hallmark of selfish, shallow, capitalistic individuals. It took me a while to realise I’d got it all wrong. There’s probably nothing more important, or more valuable, to a human life than being joyful. But I’ll come to that in a minute. First, I must ask: why are moral philosophers overwhelmingly snooty about happiness?

The ancient Stoics told us to greet pleasure with a shrug and a casual “meh!” For misery guts John Stuart Mill, it was “better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”. As for Nietzsche, he proclaimed (in the worst put-down he could imagine): “Man does not aspire to happiness; only the Englishman does........

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