Britain has a new agenda and its name is happiness. It launches next month when the Office for National Statistics begins asking random citizens “Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?” For this we have to thank two old Etonians — the Prime Minister, who wants the Government to concentrate on “well-being as well as economic growth”, and the Labour peer Richard Layard, an economist who once caught Tony Blair’s ear, who is a founder member of the Happiness Movement.
It is, however, a third Old Etonian, ginger-haired, dressed casually in a blue shirt and jeans, that I follow to a primary school in the East End of London, where he is to spread the H-word. “What are the two most important things in life?” he asks 60 six-year-olds in the gym of Orchard school, Hackney. “Birthdays?” suggests a lad. “Money,” another trumps him. These are not quite the answers their lecturer is seeking. A little girl offers “learning”. Naah-whaah! The most important things, explains the author of the series of children’s books called World of Happy, are “love” (an exhalation of “eugh” from midway down the hall) and “happiness”.
Before he sets off on his mission, I meet a trepidatious Giles Andreae in his white-walled offices in Notting Hill. If you do not recognise his awkward Eastern European name (pronounced as in Peter Andre) you will know his alter ego’s. As Purple Ronnie, which began as a street poetry act in Oxford in 1987, Andreae has sold thousands of greetings cards bearing sentiments such as “I want to say I love you/ And you make my life complete/ Except for all your bottom burps/ And your stinky feet”.
In 2007 he sold the rights to the character for £3.3 million. On other days he is Edward Monkton, “poet, artist, philosopher and interesting fellow”, author, if this is possible, of children’s books for grown-ups, which Andreae illustrates with rudimentary cartoons. Monkton’s sayings also make their way on to cards, calendars and knick-knacks. A not atypical Monkton rhyme goes: “Beware of the deadly donkey, falling from the sky/you can choose the way you live, my friend, /but not the way you die.”
The World of Happy titles retain the silliness of his previous work — dogs poo in them, sharks burp, a young gorilla knits — but are more didactic. Their covers announce them as stories about “being true to yourself” or “being beautiful inside” or “love and dancing”. Take away the rude bits and they would have fitted in to prep school libraries 100 years ago. The burping sharks are taught good manners. A sea-shy penguin learns bravery. In Tortoise Football the turtles learn about “playing together” (although they do not actually sing the Eton boating song, “Swing swing together, With your bodies between your knees”, you feel they might at any moment).
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“I’m well aware that I probably sound like my father or my father’s father, but I just think we’re slightly missing a focus on what you might call old-fashioned values,” he says. “World of Happy is all about creating a world of very contemporary short fables, parables really, that are fun, I hope, and light-hearted and silly and humorous, but which understand the essence of really quite old-fashioned morals.”
Andreae is such an extraordinarily prolific writer of children’s books that at least some of his works are likely to be cherished in your home. Rumble in the Jungle is a bedtime favourite in our house, I tell him. “Oh, that’s kind, not many philosophical messages in there,” he says. That’s probably why we like it, I twit him. “Fair enough,” he says. He knows he is a “goody goody”. Anarchy in a children’s book is about as welcome to him as it is in Piccadilly for old school pal, David Cameron.
Yet there is, let us be clear, no evidence that World of Happy is a ruling class conspiracy. The pursuit of happiness is not for him a political fad. The Pig of Happiness written in 2003 under the Edward Monkton brand is about a pig who shows such goodwill towards his herd that happiness leaks out of him. An animation of it has been viewed 128,000 times on YouTube. “Together,” says Geoffrey Palmer, the actor narrating the story, “we can spread the love, quietly, gently, person by person.” A month ago a comment on the YouTube site asked: “How is it possible for 22 people to dislike this?”
You would probably need to be an eternally damned cynic, something Andreae very clearly is not. Andreae at 45 belongs to a generation of educated Englishmen who once having been given permission to emote, has turned emoting into an art form. He has experienced, heaven knows, enough to loosen any stiff upper lip. Aged 22, while studying at Oxford, he was told he had lymphatic cancer, a disease that spread through his body. He recovered and has been happily married for 15 years to Victoria. The couple have four children born from sperm frozen before his chemotherapy. In 2008 he suffered clinical depression triggered by the looming recession. Andeae was in the process of moving his family from London to a big house in Oxfordshire. That and the thought of years of Eton’s colossal school fees buried him. Does it help when someone says “You need never work again, Giles. You’re a rich man”? “Well, it doesn’t help actually. You set yourself your own targets and living standards. I had a lovely father, a very nice, gentle man . . . I remember him worrying at his desk every night, looking at bills and school fees, and me thinking ‘God, that man is not really happy’. I don’t want to be that man, and I was becoming that man.”
For six months he lost all joy. “I’m slightly conscious of the fact that this might sound too glib and soundbitey, but I’d rather have cancer again than depression,” he says.
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And when a sense of joy returned he was overcome. “Bizarrely, it was a very mundane moment: one of my children giving me a bar of — sorry, I’m being quite emotional about it, one of my children giving me a bar of chocolate.
I felt an overwhelming rush of tenderness.’
The link between this psychological crisis and his current crusade is obvious. “I would like people in this country to understand happiness in the simplest way possible, in the way that when I was young I knew that before you cross the road, you have to stop, look, listen, look right, look left, look right again and then cross. I would like to think [this school visit] today is my first go at attempting to crystallise a formula for children to remember. If at any time in their lives they’re thinking ‘I’m not sure things are working out for me. I’m a bit depressed. Am I happy? Am I doing the right thing?’ I would like them to be able to think, ‘OK, here’s my little checklist’.”
But the question now is how the children of Orchard School will receive his philosophical discourse. He signs a picture book for them. It is called More Pants, which, of course, they love.
His easiness with them reminds me of our most comfortable-in-his-own-skin celebrity, the Prime Minister himself — and I also recall that David Cameron recently rated his own happiness at only six out of ten.
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The lecture is extraordinarily ambitious. Andreae’s formula for happiness is based on an acronym of DANCE. D is for Dedication, he says but has to explain what the word means. To illustrate, he reads The Pink Cricket, a story about “following your dreams”. A is for keeping Active, like the knitting gorilla. N is for Nurture, celebrated in the Lovely Whales story.
C is for ... “Cake?” asks a child hopefully. No, C is for Celebrate, which is what the soccer-crazy tortoises do. And E is for Enjoying what you have, as the cats do in The Ministry of Niceness.
The children concentrate astonishingly well, although the zero-tolerance, no-fidget policy enforced by one of their teachers dissuades Andreae from asking them to join him in a Dance of Wallowy Bigness. For a moment I wonder if the Dance of Wallowy Bigness could soon be unveiled as the soundtrack to his important friend’s Big Society. Surely not. But if Cameron ever needs a sufficiently remunerated Secretary of State at the Ministry of Niceness, Andreae would be a shoo-in.
Giles Andreae’s 13 World of Happy books are available in all good bookshops, priced £3.99. To buy the whole set for £25, please visit www.egmont.co.uk/WOHTimes and enter the code: P11-WOHTIM