Powys

It’s 1am on a Sunday morning, and I’m standing in Crystals, a nightclub in Newtown, Powys, Wales, watching 20-odd people pogo around to I Gotta Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas. Among the figures on the half-empty dancefloor there’s a bloke who, a little bizarrely, had yelled, “You f****** liberal,” at me as I walked into the club, on account, I assume, of my poncey North London demeanour and notebook. There’s also a chap who had sometime earlier during our six-hour pub crawl around town, hollered, “Oi, gayboy,” at the Times photographer accompanying me. And in the middle, there’s a couple who were earlier physically fighting in a local pub, and judging from the teary way they’re conducting themselves, and the freshness of the scratch marks on his face, I’m not sure if they’re not going to kick off again.

In short, I’m having a crap time, which is problematic as I’ve been sent to Mid Wales for the weekend to find out why Powys was recently named the happiest place in Britain to live, topping a list of 273 districts in a study published by a team from the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester. Which is not to suggest I haven’t met or talked to people who like it here. Over the phone, Welsh siren and TV weathergirl Siân Lloyd had raved about Powys being “very relaxed” and “unpretentious”. Her ex, Lembit Öpik, the Member of Parliament for the constituency of Montgomeryshire, whom we’d bumped into in the local pub where the fight had broken out between that couple, had raved about Powys’s “community spirit”. A student nurse had praised the beautiful views (“If you feel rubbish, you just need to look out of the window and you feel better”).

But for every gush I have in my notebook, there are at least three complaints. Among them, the punter in the Black Boy Hotel (yes, that’s the name) who’d declared mournfully, “If you have any intelligence, you get out”; the student working as a barmaid during holidays who had said, “There’s no way I’m coming back, there are no job prospects here at all”; and the middle-aged man in the cinema who’d laughed for what seemed like a whole minute when I told him Powys had been named the happiest place in Britain. Behind him,

I couldn’t help noticing a poster advertising a movie called Zombieland with the tagline, “This place is so dead.” Things don’t improve much the next day…

Read atTimes Online