I AM not happy, and I’ll tell you why – because I don’t like being told I’m unhappy when I am probably much happier than you think.

Let me explain.

For a start, for some years now I have been aware I have a fairly miserable face, and unfortunately I can’t do much about it.

If I were a dog I would be a Basset, and sometimes I think I should try to get some work as an official mourner at funerals.

More often than not it gives the wrong impression of how I feel inside, and only relatively rarely does it accurately reflect my mood.

But if I looked unhappy last week it was because I was, after reading reports of a survey that tried to gauge national and personal wellbeing.

They tried to measure ‘anxiety’ and ‘life satisfaction’, which is fair enough, but also ‘happiness’, which would be all well and good if that was something that could be defined, let alone measured.

I didn’t come out of the survey at all well.

It found that not only are men less happy than women, but the unhappiest age group of all are 50 to 54-year-olds, which is me.

Take it from me that it doesn’t make you very happy to be told you are officially among the grumpiest people in Britain.

At least there was some good news if I manage to live another 11 years, because the BBC were among those who reported the happiest group was people aged between 65 and 79.

They didn’t say whether or not it was a coincidence that this age group is also most likely to include people called Larry.

Neither did they say whether they had asked any oldies if they would like to swap places with somebody who is, for instance, in their late 20s, which is a shame because I think the answer would blow all the results of the survey right out of the water.

I don’t normally take much notice of surveys that are reported in the media, because they usually involve asking one man and his dog some loaded questions, but this one sampled no less than 300,000 people and was published by no less an organisation than the Office of National Statistics.

I tried, in vain, to find out how much this exercise had cost the taxpayer, but I think you can rest assured it wasn’t cheap.

So I decided to delve deeper and find out what we got for our money, and discovered the results of the survey online, in great detail.

I even found that the happiness rating of people in Swindon is 7.35, which is pretty average.

In fact, wherever you live in Britain, your happiness is pretty average, because every rating begins with a seven, unless you live in Liverpool or Wolverhampton, which both scored just under seven, while a handful of other places – mostly remote Scottish communities – scored a fraction over eight.

The same goes, in fact, for the age groups, where the differences were all tiny, so while I might be grumpier than people of other ages, when you look at the figures closely there is so little difference it is hardly worth bothering about.

That briefly cheered me up, until I thought about it and realised the government had spent an awful lot of money on a survey that really only tells us what we already knew: that happiness is extremely subjective, very personal and always fluctuating.

So if you see a 54-year-old and he looks miserable, it’s probably because he is thinking there are better things we could be spending our money on.