I have been asleep for nearly a month. It is relatively easy to do in rural England, particularly if you have no telephone or internet.

No Dahr Jamail, no Electronic Intifada, no CounterPunch or Znet. No news except the anodyne rubbish that the BBC churns out. No siege in Gaza (merely a ‘blockade’); and for all I know, the various wars that we began have almost fizzled out. At any rate, the only victims now – according to the BBC - are the odd American and some faceless al Quaeda operatives.

Absence of information is important if you want to keep the outside world out, but the distractions of nature also help. You need to have to tear yourself away from what is refreshing, comforting, invigorating, calming, and you need not to want to do so. You need to feel that the minute idyll you inhabit is all that matters, all the world you need to see.

And rural life lulls: hills roll, the pace of happening is slowed, nature renews itself. There are treats that would be hard to come by in the city, like open skies and birdsong by day, owls and the stars by night. The natives here are friendly and fresh-faced, blown through with clean air and the sounds and quiet smells of a rural existence. The homeless do not interrupt you on your doorstep.

It is easy to slip into imagining that this can be the edge of your vision, that this encompasses all you need to think about, and that it would be churlish to complain or criticise or fall back into melancholy moods. How pleasant it is to be warm and comfy, more or less at peace and with one’s eyes closed. How tempting to pull up the bedclothes and go back to sleep.

The right to be happy

Perhaps it is alright to do so: the US constitution awards its citizens an unusual right, one which other international bills of rights do not include:

'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.' (emphasis added)

The pursuit of happiness seems an innocent enough right, if difficult to guarantee in practice, given the complexity and unpredictability of human moods. But like all rights, we must assume that this one too is limited in the case of every individual by the equal right of others to pursue it too.

Someone recently went even further in prescribing happiness, suggesting that we have not just a right, but a duty to be happy. They meant the privileged, presumably. We couldn’t, after all, demand that the underprivileged be happy (Grin and bear it, you immoral bastards!)

The half-way serious point was that if we are privileged and others are not, we should at least enjoy it. What right have we to complain while others are so very much worse off. But that is a very ‘British’ obligation, I suspect - a way of salving your conscience, of showing that you are aware of your privileges, are grateful for them (even if you do think that they were deserved), and that you are even prepared to allocate the underprivileged a moment of your privileged thoughts. That somehow makes it a noble, self-aware and socially responsible attitude (or so it is believed). It is a common state of mind among the (British) ruling classes: count your blessings, and do not ask from whence they came.

But the thought that blessings might need to be – and ought to be - shared with those less fortunate, so that everyone’s ‘right’ to happiness can be realised to the maximum extent; the thought that perhaps your blessings may even be preventing others from enjoying any of their own; and the thought – perish it – that your blessings might actually be ill-gained, unearned and the property of others should not be entertained, should never be allowed to encroach upon the idyll, or you might wake up. And once you are awake, it’s hard sometimes to carry out your patriotic duty to be happy.

It is surely fine to be warm and comfy – and can even be right to enjoy it – as long as you are not hogging the bedclothes. But if you are, and if the bedclothes you are hogging are stolen property, if those from whom they were taken are shivering in sub-zero temperatures; and if, on top of all of that, you send your corporations over to remove their cotton vests at gunpoint and smash the remnants of their lives – then perhaps we have a patriotic duty to wake up, even if the consequence of that is to make us just a little more unhappy.