This Greek guy will explain.

“Listen, I swear to Zeus I haven’t been near that place in the woods where the mushrooms grow, but how about we build a huge wooden horse? And this is the good bit, oh I know you’re going to love this, we make a hollow belly and…”

You have to admire the cojones of the Trojan, let’s call him Pericles after a flatmate of my student days, who had that light bulb moment – even if it was more a flaming torch moment, or a smouldering ashes of Troy moment, or not a moment at all, given it existed in the realm of myth.

But let’s not quibble for it must still rank as one of the most impressive acts of misdirection ever, an exemplar of what Forbes Magazine might call the high art of low cunning, surpassed perhaps only by Jefferson’s insistence on the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” in the drafting of the US Declaration of Independence.

My contention is that happiness, and for Jefferson the word was of course a stand-in for money or profit, is not something to be hunted like the Snark, the Wilderpeople or Red October. Happiness isn’t an object, an objective, a key performance indicator, a dividend, or a profit margin. Nor is it somewhere you look up on Trip Adviser. Happiness is a feeling and, as with any feeling, it will surely pass and be surpassed by the next feeling.

To dress in Victorian whites and run through a poppy field trying to catch happiness with a butterfly net is folly, as is to daub an outline of its image in red ochre on the wall of a cave, or to nail it to a wooden cross and offer only sour wine for consolation. Such pursuits tell their own story; they won’t though take you to a location location location in which you can linger, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice, a place where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came.

Happiness is a warm gun was the blackest thought on the White Album. However, to quote another musician, a bass-playing Manc: that would be a “long-term solution to a short-term problem”. Unhappiness, like its opposite, can be here today and gone tomorrow – as with an unforgivable pun, the smell of gherkins, or a home defeat to Swindon Town.

And this is not to downplay the extent of the problems some people grapple with daily, like a mythical but all too real manifestation of a composite character pushing a boulder up a hill while an eagle pecks at their flesh and, having rolled all the way back down the slope, Jack ‘n’ Jill fashion, they finish up in a broken heap of limbs at the edge of a pond only to fall in love with their own reflection. Before starting the process all over again. Forever.

You can call it myth or you can call it addiction, depression, grief, whichever your own story of the blues – or, in Capote’s words, the mean reds.

Happiness can also be found in the everyday and the exceptional. At risk of parodying the Sound Of Music, and let me say I don’t like any musicals apart from the musicals I like, these are currently some of my favourite things: a hall filled with young (and some not so young) graduates, including my oldest child, wearing their gowns and invincible selfie smiles, aglow with potential; sitting at a bus stop on Easter Road watching a rivulet of rainwater dividing like the hydra with its nine heads (give or take); a Dalmatian on its hind legs spying on me through a window and I can’t see the tail but I just know it’s wagging; and reading a passage in a book by Diana Athill in which she – a keen if compassionate observer of the human condition, an author and editor who knew better than most how to put the best words in their best order, and 101 when she died in 2019 – drops the c-bomb out of a blue and cloudless sky.

She could have been but wasn’t describing our friend Pericles, the ideas man. He’s tasked with knocking on the gates of Troy to announce the offering of the wooden horse with a hollow belly. Shush, no spoilers. But, such is the fate of all messengers, they shoot him, or rather they pierce his chest with a spear.

And as he exhales his last breath Pericles sees not his life flash before his eyes but an as yet unwritten story by Borges about an animal imagined by Kafka, an animal “with the big tail, a tail many yards long and like a fox’s brush. How I should like to get my hands on this tail sometime, but it is impossible…the tail is constantly being flung this way, and that. The animal resembles a kangaroo, but not as to the face…Sometimes I have the feeling that the animal is trying to tame me”. Whatever.

Wheel in that horse will you. ■

Rodger Evans