The trick of happiness is to know how to master your rage and turn it into something useful. I don’t know if there is some eastern sage who first said that, but it is the kind of thing that could easily be expanded into one of those airport-bookstall business management best sellers. You know the kind of thing. Lao Tsu and the Art of Useful Rage. I might have a crack at it myself. In chapter one we would discuss the concept of Useless Rage.
This is when you appear naked on the heath, after experiencing some cosmic injustice, and come up with all sorts of impractical ways of taking revenge.
Let me give you an example from the past few days. On Thursday afternoon I was standing in a conference hall in Zurich when I heard an elderly Swiss lawyer inform the world that football had been invented in China. My hackles rose. He then went on to say that it had been “developed” in Scotland, when we all know that it was begun and codified in London. By this stage I was fit to be tied. But when he announced that the World Cup was going to Russia and then Qatar, dashing English hopes of hosting the competition for at least 20 years, I am afraid I had a kind of seizure.