Sat, Sep 05, 2009 page9

• Happiness can’t be sprayed out of a can, so try the great outdoors

  A scientist claims his mown-grass room spray will improve people’s memory and lift their mood. Perhaps actually mowing a lawn might be more effective

  • By Victoria Coren / THE GUARDIAN
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  Imagine that you are walking through Yosemite National Park. You are feeling happy. The early autumn sunshine is streaming down on to the cedar trees and giant sequoias. To your right, a family of plump, skittish deer is grazing on an alpine meadow. To your left, the Merced river flows through an ancient canyon.

  You have been wandering for hours, through forests and past waterfalls, breathing in the fresh air, climbing higher above sea level, stretching your legs, forgetting the time. You settle down on the freshly mown grass of a picnic area and reach for a refreshing drink from your water bottle. You gaze upwards and soaring there, tiny against the vast, snow-topped mountains, yet majestic in its graceful wingspan, is a golden eagle.

  Why do you think you are happy?

  Nick Lavidis, neuroscientist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, explains it is because “cut grass releases a chemical which makes people feel better” — so he has bottled it to be marketed as a room spray.

  This is inspired by Lavidis’ own stroll through Yosemite National Park and subsequent laboratory study, which apparently proved that cut grass, as well as promoting happiness, benefits the hippocampus region of the brain, improving our memory functions.

  And I say: This sums up everything that is wrong with our stupid, soulless, lazy, money-driven, empty modern culture. Why take an airy hike through one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes when you can spray a chemical approximation of it round the room and lie on the sofa watching a soap opera on TV?

  I hate Lavidis. I’m sure he’s a nice man, but I despise him and everything he stands for. Fine, so this nonsense may improve your memory. But what, precisely, will you be remembering? The happy day you clicked “purchase” on the room spray at an online checkout? The golden moment when you first pointed it at the carpet from your wheezy prone position on a beanbag in front of the TV?

  I’ll tell you what improves your memory. Getting up off your arse and going out to do something that’s worth remembering.

  I haven’t been to Yosemite National Park since I was 17. I had left school, worked in a shop for a few months to save up some money, then set off to take Greyhound buses round the US. By the time I found myself standing in front of Yosemite Falls, the highest waterfall in North America, with three months’ worth of clothes and books in a turquoise nylon rucksack on my knackered back, I had already seen New York for the first time, been to a Southern Baptist church service in Kentucky, got drunk with a group of depressed Apaches in a run-down pueblo, had a strange night out with a gun-toting gang in a weird jazz club on the outskirts of New Orleans, watched a grubby and shambolic Bob Dylan perform his old hits to an audience of 40 somewhere in North Carolina and read Moby Dick overnight on a bus.

  I just don’t believe that my brain would have “benefited” in the same way if I had done none of these things, simply stayed at home and smelt them.

  Sadly, soon after Yosemite, I got the bus to Las Vegas, learnt how to play poker and never did anything else again.

  But I do mow the lawn sometimes. And it does make me feel happy. There’s the nice aroma of cut grass. And there’s the satisfaction of a job well done? Or, if not well done, at least honorably attempted. There’s the pride in having a bit of soft grass out the back, among the neighbors’ tarmac’ed off-street parking and the council’s concrete pavements, for the rain to soak gratefully into. There’s the reminder of renewal and growth, cycles and returns, that comes with all planting or weeding or pruning and helps the gardener to feel just a little bit more connected to the universal pattern and a little bit less terrified of death. Can your room spray do that, Dr Lavidis? Can it do that?

  Last week, a “fat-burning lip balm” went on sale in the UK. It has been available in the US for a few months already; I bought one when I was over there in June. (In Las Vegas, obviously. Playing poker. I barely saw daylight, never mind a waterfall.)

  The slogan on the packet was: “Huge lips, Skinny hips”. Of course, that actually sounds hideous. I don’t want to look like a matchstick with a giant mouth. I was just fascinated by the madness of the short cut. The answer to excess weight is a slow process of diet and exercise, not reaching for yet another sweet, sticky substance and smearing it on your face. And it doesn’t work anyway. Its cinnamon flavor made me so peckish I slicked it on and immediately consumed three doughnuts.

  What we sometimes forget about diets and exercise is that, like hiking through Yosemite or mowing the lawn, they are, in their arduousness, ultimately satisfying. People must stop inventing new products that remove our motivation to do something the right way, the effortful way, and feel good about it. What next? A box of doughnuts that watches Shakespeare plays on our behalf and gives us a three-line plot summary? A packet of cigarettes that phones our parents to see how they are? A TV remote that walks the dog, gives blood, helps an old lady across the road and hurries back in time for us to flick over to the latest instalment of a favorite soap?

  Perhaps Dr Nick Lavidis is already working on all these gadgets and more. But sometimes, Dr Lavidis, you can’t get the good feeling of having done something, the “happiness” or the “better memory,” unless you actually do it.
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