Julie Burchill

Why British women are so unhappy

Sadness is chic

  • From Spectator Life
Emma Thompson in Love Actually (Alamy)

I must admit to being somewhat taken aback on reading – in a new survey by the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index, whatever that is when it’s at home – that we women of Blighty are sadder and more ‘stressed’ than our sisters on the European mainland. Odd because I’ve always found us a cheerful bunch; after all, we were churning out the Carry On films, graced with Babs Windsor’s lusty chuckle, while French, Italian and Scandinavian film actresses were all looking like they’d lost a fiver and found a euro.

Being jolly has for some time been seen to be the mark of a peasant

But apparently, of the 79,000 women across 143 countries surveyed, 32 per cent of British women felt sadness the previous day ‘compared with 26 per cent of women in the EU’ according to the Times. (I can see where this one’s going – it’s not just Rufus Wainwright’s musical closing early that Brexit’s to blame for, it’s the fact that your wife is scowling at you.)

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