What makes you happy? Perhaps it’s something you’d like to share?

It’s been a hard year for most of us and that got Christine Manby thinking about the things that bring her joy. Here she launches a new series called Try This to discover what makes other people happy

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

There’s still three months to go but I don’t think anyone could contest that 2020 will go down in history as having been a “very bad year”.  There can’t be a person on the planet whose life hasn’t been impacted in a negative way by the dreaded Covid-19, even if that impact was nothing more serious than a long-awaited football match missed or a party postponed. 

But the cloudy skies of 2020 have offered small glimmers of silver too. For me, freed from the mad shuttling around London that characterised my pre-Covid life, it was suddenly having more time to read, to create and, whisper it, to watch some telly.

As we settled into lockdown, we were all looking for ways to amuse ourselves at home (stop smirking at the back) and my social media feeds were soon full of people asking for and offering recommendations for uplifting music, books, films and televisions series to pass the time.