SURVEYS are always a source of fun. Well, they make me laugh. A pub chain funded research to discover the secret of a happy home and came up with a list of 30 factors that ranged from “enjoying time together as a family” to having a garage. A garage, apparently, is a source of delight? With or without a garage, the average mum and dad rated their family's happiness at eight out of 10. There was no mention about how much money you needed.
“There is a myth,” quoted an expert, “that money can bring happiness – it is far from the truth.”
Yet in another survey that probed people's regrets, four of the top six responses related to a lack of cash. Bizarrely, in the same top 50 list of what people would do differently if they had the chance, number 40 was: Have children earlier, 41: Have children, 42: Have more children, and 43: Have more one night stands. Well, that would do it.
Results from surveys, rather than discovering some scientific insight into human behaviour, sometimes prove that people are wonderfully daft. Eleven per cent of those asked thought HTML (a term familiar with anyone who has a computer) was a sexually transmitted disease, 27% identified "gigabyte" as an insect commonly found in South America, 23% thought an "MP3" was a Star Wars robot, and 18% said "Blu-ray" was a marine animal.
Surveys and quizzes are dominant on social media for people to share with their friends, inviting them to waste 10 minutes of life in an attempt to discover which sandwich they are or which Harry Potter character is their doppelgänger.
Purely in the interests of purely unscientific research, I undertook a couple and discovered the celebrity I most resemble is Michael Jackson which is strange, as I haven't had cosmetic surgery and am not dead. Another said my dominant trait was sensitivity, and a third that my inner child's name was Funky Baby.
I only hope the next time I go to the pub nobody calls me Funky Baby and asks me to do the Moon Walk. I'm so sensitive I might thump them.
Oh, and by the way, my Harry Potter character is Albus Dumbledore: “Not only are you incredibly intelligent, but you're also really good at dishing out sage advice. You have a bit of an ambitious dark side, but ultimately you're all about the power of love.”
Couldn't have put it better myself.
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