AS a brief distraction from the deeply distressing reports from South-East Asia this week, I turned briefly to a newspaper interview with a scientist who claims he has found the key to happiness.

Perhaps it was not such a good idea. Professor Ruut Veenhoven has collected 8,000 pieces of research on wellbeing from more than 120 countries to create a World Database of Happiness.

What he has discovered is that happiness levels peak after marriage but, when children arrive, they plummet dramatically, like an aeroplane nose-diving. As the mother of five children, this was not what I wanted to hear.

The one glimmer of hope the professor offered was scant consolation: "The trend reverses at the age of 85, when those with children are happier than those without," he explains. So, according to the professor, I have just 43 years of misery to go.

This rather bleak picture is backed up with statistics and computer graphs, charting the effect everything from sleepless nights to financial demands and increased responsibilities have on parents.

The professor appears to have uncovered little scientific proof of the positive effect of having children. In fact, looking at his evidence alone, you would begin to wonder why we have them at all.

For that, I had to return to the news pages. For, amid the stories of so many shattered lives, there are constant reminders of just how unbearable the thought of losing a child is and, consequently, the joy their very existence brings.

One mother faced certain death as she ran into the giant wave to save her three sons. The pure happiness on another's face when she was reunited with a baby she thought she had lost lit up our television screens.

The love between a parent and child may not be easy to measure scientifically. Yet, as we witness every day in South-East Asia, it is a bond more powerful than the awesome wrath of nature.

So who cares about a dent in the bank balance and a few sleepless nights?

THE hounding of North-East MP David Miliband by some newspapers and Opposition MPs over he and his wife's adoption of a baby in America before Christmas is heartless. The couple suffered a miscarriage a while ago and, as an American, Louise Miliband is entitled to adopt in the country of her birth. They went through the proper channels and there is no evidence they were fast-tracked. This is both a joyous and stressful time for the Miliband family. They, and baby Isaac, should be left in peace.

I COULDN'T wait to tear down our Christmas cards and decorations this week. When I was a child, the tree went up the day before Christmas Eve. Now many follow the lead of our high street stores and get out the tinsel and baubles even before December 1. By the time Boxing Day is over, they start to look dusty and forlorn. But at least we all still adhere to the unwritten rule about taking all decorations down by Twelfth Night. One year I was in New York at the end of January and noticed there were still trees and Christmas lights in many windows. "When do you take your decorations down?" I asked the cab driver. "In New York, we take decorations down when we want to take them down," he told me.