My week has again been dominated by giving interviews about the new Channel 4 TV series In the Footsteps of Killers, and about my book A Plot to Kill.
The book describes the murder in 2015 of the author and English lecturer Peter Farquhar in the most extraordinary of circumstances in the village of Maids Moreton, on the edge of Buckingham.
What I’ve come to realise is that in each of these interviews, at some stage I will be asked exactly the same question – how do I stay happy given the work that I do and the things that I write about?
I usually answer this question by saying that I am psychologically “robust”, good at compartmentalising – in other words, being able to keep my personal life separate from my work – that I have a supportive family and outside interests such as rugby to keep me occupied, although I do occasionally despair about the performances of Glasgow Warriors and Northampton Saints.
However, for various reasons that I can’t quite fathom, this answer never seems to satisfy my interviewers who will try to probe a little harder given, as it was put to me, the “dark places” that my work might take me to.
It started me thinking that there must be some better way of explaining how to remain, or indeed become happy especially as I know that I can’t be the only person who has to deal with difficult situations in the day-to-day reality of their work.
Doctors and nurses, police officers, social workers, news reporters, firefighters and paramedics must all have to deal with these “dark places” at some points in their working lives just as much as any criminologist.
So, where might I get some professional insight into happiness?
Incredibly the University of Edinburgh has one of the few sociologists in Europe who studies this issue – Dr Neil Thin, a senior lecturer who researches and lectures on happiness and who recently worked with the UN and the government of Bhutan to promote “Gross National Happiness” as the core aim of development and who is seeking to make happiness part of national planning.
I reached out to Neil and in between walking his collie and playing his fiddle, he offered to me his three “top tips” to promote happiness.
1. Rethink – Recognise that your own mind is something you can learn to steer towards more happiness-inducing thinking habits. And no, I don’t mean simple self-pretence of the “think yourself happier” variety.
I mean giving yourself times and space to process the immense amount of information we bombard ourselves with.
Sometimes you may benefit most just from letting your mind wander. Sometimes what you will need is to reflect in a more focused way on either bad stuff or the good stuff in your life.
2. Remake – Just to stay happy, let alone get happier, we need to make changes to our immediate lives from time to time.
The first step is to consider which things could do with a change – your body, your hobbies, your job, your friendships?
The next step is to recognise which things you can change and which you can’t.
3. Relocate – We evolved as a nomadic species, but we also get very attached to places. Juggling between comfort zones and adventures is perhaps the most difficult life skill.
But when in situ rethinking and remaking aren’t doing it for us, we should consider whether temporary or longer-term relocation might be life-enhancing.
A holiday? A sabbatical or a season in a different country? Or maybe full-on migration?
This all seems like sensible advice to me – all the more so because it is about helping people to think more clearly about their options for improving their lives, rather than those nagging “self-help” guides which seem to suggest you just need to “do this and get happy”, like take exercise and get some more sleep.
Neil is instead suggesting changing your mind; your personal “world”; and your location.
Of these three tips Neil has provided I know that in my own life I do allow my mind to wander and that “wandering” comes in the tangible shape of books and podcasts. They take me out of my world and help me to think about something other than violent crime.
Of course I can combine the podcasts with my actual wanderings – I love to walk – but there’s hardly a day in the week when I am not reading a book that has caught my eye.
Of late, for example, I have read Michael Palin’s Erebus: The Story of a Ship, and Michael Lewis’s The Premonition, about the pandemic.
Reading allows me an insight into a completely different world but also affords an opportunity to consider what I might learn from different subject areas and therefore how I can become a better criminologist.
So you will perhaps forgive me if I end not by having allowed my mind to wander, but by describing the most recent book that has caught my attention: Yellow Bird by Sheila Crane Murdoch.
This is the extraordinary story of a native American woman from North Dakota called Lissa Yellow Bird who, when she was released from prison in 2009, uncovers what had happened to a missing oil worker called Kristopher Clarke and who has now gone on to have a career as an amateur detective who searches for the bodies of missing native American women.
Tragically, Lissa would go on to discover the body of her own niece who had gone missing – a feat she accomplished in just four days.
The techniques she used in that case and the others that she has investigated, might not necessarily be those which can be employed by law enforcement agencies more generally but her work made me think about how we currently look for missing people, and what it is that we might learn from Lissa’s success.
I hope Neil doesn’t mind, but that makes me happy too.
● In the Footsteps of Killers is on Channel 4 at 10pm on Wednesday, and A Plot to Kill is published on June 17 by Sphere.
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