Stop being so bloody miserable, the Labour minister Tom Harris has decided to declare in a pounced-upon pep talk to the nation.
He wonders on his own personal blog - which has been seized by the Conservatives and the Daily Mail - just where all our crippling cynicism has come from.
The Mail claims Harris's musings on postwar spirit are "astonishing" at a time when the International Monetary Fund says house prices are 30% too high and the average price of petrol is 118p per litre.
Explaining his thoughts, the transport minister is quoted as saying: "In our own country today, despite the recent credit squeeze, our citizens have never been so wealthy. High-def TVs fly off the shelves quicker than they can be imported... Eating out - a rare treat when I was a child in the seventies - is as commonplace as going shopping... we spend money in quantities that would have made our parents gasp."
In an attempt to rebuff such criticism, the Mail has compiled a helpful list of ten reasons to be cheerful. A nice selection is as follows: tomorrow is the longest day of the year, George Clooney is single again and George Bush has only 214 days left in office. There's something for all of us there.
The list coincides with a somewhat dubious page 3 offering in the Telegraph that attempts to tell us - on scientific evidence no less - that today is actually the happiest day of the year.
Cliff Arnall, a psychologist and former tutor at Cardiff Univeristy, has apparently worked this out using the formula O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He. In layman's terms this means that lighter weather, the prospect of holidays and the memory of childhood summers all happily coincide today, June 20.
So is Harris right? Or are you happier today than ever?
*This is an extended version of the Wrap, our digest of the daily papers
