What is everyone talking about this week: Thanks to modern-day technology, people were far happier in the days when Nero was setting Rome ablaze

My flatmate has started taking online French lessons. It’s a lot harder than when we took the subject at GCSE, she says, because her current teacher insists on over-philosophising everything.

Truthfully, I once overheard him lecture the class on how happiness has become a pipe dream due to technology and that people were far happier in the days when Nero was setting Rome ablaze, amid a lesson purportedly about the past participle. She may have had a point.

When pressed for actual evidence of the ancient world’s superior happiness, the teacher cited its ‘superior production of art’. I have since had countless conversations about the incident with people and, although we all agree that production of art is no metric by which to measure happiness, we also can’t agree what is. The subject tends to crop up a lot this time of year as the sun sets before 4pm and seasonal affective disorder (SAD) sweeps through the country faster than the common cold, with conversations increasingly set to a refrain of: ‘When will I be happy again?’

According to the UN, that will be March 20: the date the organisation has chosen as the international day of happiness and when it publishes its annual World Happiness Rankings. This also happens to be the first day of spring. The Rankings are flawed, consistently placing Finland close to the top despite the country historically having one of the highest suicide rates in Europe. Data, it seems, cannot tell the full story, which suggests that happiness may be better captured by eschewing an academic approach altogether — a fact that was further confirmed when I asked an ancient historian which Roman Emperor was the happiest, and she answered ‘Caligula’.

Most of us will experience small moments of happiness every day: it is these, more than a grandiose ideal, that we ought to celebrate. People in the bleak midwinter love to talk about how grim things are, rather than thinking about reasons to be cheerful. So, here’s one. There are now lamps built specifically to target SAD (£42.99 at John Lewis), the market revenue of which is projected to double by 2035. We will all be a little happier, a little lighter, in 10 years’ time.

Of course, more analogue mood elevators offer greater comforts still (perhaps the French teacher did have a point about tech after all). Who, indeed, needs a SAD lamp when you have a woodburning fire — which also means saving a small fortune on the Trudon Spiritus Sancti candles that people (read: I) burn to simulate firewood? As ever: to the country.