Happiness #6 Enjoy a lovely meal.

Spend some time to cook a wonderful meal with your girl-/boyfriend or friends at home, or enjoy a gourmet meal at the restaurant. The French are masters in enjoying good food and wine - learn from them! Do not do other things while you eat, such as watching television simultaneously. Focus on your meal and being with those you eat, or dine, with.

I am very fond of cooking. After I got decent knives (good knives are half the cooking experience, everything goes so smoothly and quickly that it's almost as if the food comes about by itself, like magic) the pleasure of cooking has only gotten bigger.

From time to time we invite guests, which makes the meal even more fun to make because I then cook something other than my usual 15 - minute dinners.

I have a friend who almost always brings along one or more mysterious guests, because she knows I think it's fine. It could be someone she thinks sits alone too often in the evenings, or anyone who comes to her door as she is on the way out. I have realized that many think it's weird or something they would have had problems to tackle, but for me it's just the way she is, and it is always nice. More than nice, it is downright pleasant.

It's so pleasant that we often don’t move on into the lounge. The talking flows, they are like chatterboxes, and I don’t have the heart to hurry them on. So, we sit on hard kitchen chairs all night, without anyone being upset or think less of me because of it.

She says that the reason why she invites guests along is that she knows I do not mind (eventually I have learned to expect that there will be more guests than I initially invited) and since she sees that I have such a relaxed attitude to this unusual extend hospitality, she even finds it amusing and makes a point out of it. She is aware that it is of course strictly unheard of… just not with me.

I'm never quite finished cooking when guests arrive. The salad is often tossed together while guests are sitting there talking. So while I’m cutting tomatoes and cucumbers we have something to talk about, like an icebreaker. There might even be a little fuss when I throw a tomato in the air and splits it in two in the air with one of the great blades of mine. (Sometimes it's okay to show off a little. Just a tiny bit, that is.)

It's so incredibly nice to make food that people show they appreciate (it is possible that their greatest pleasure is that they don’t have to do the dishes, but I do live in hope that the food is also to their tasting).

The contrast to the family meal is huge. Strikingly often we eat while we make preparations to go somewhere, almost on the go. The times we have time to have a proper meal together we tend to become less people around the table because the youngest sneak silently from the table with plate and cutlery into the living room to bench themselves in front of the TV. I'm not too happy about it, but rarely make a fuss. After all, they eat the food. As they leave the table, and the conversation stops in unhappy silence some of us reach for the newspaper to read the headlines of today, or yesterday's newspaper still to be found in the pile at end of the table. They are all aware that I do not like it, so on special occasions, Christmas and stuff, they stay, and we sit together at meal 's end. It's sort of an reward that they prove they, after all, know how to behave, and that they realize that a meal can be a special and pleasant occasion.

I have no idea what the right answer to what happiness really is, but ... although I shiver and tremble with freezing cold (perhaps not that strange as it is, after all, winter, and the wind has been whistling cold and hard for over a month now) spring is already well underway within me. I thaw and feel warmer inside, and although this is not the correct definition to what happiness is, I am sure it applies?