GOOD morning. If it is a good morning. Which I doubt... Ah yes. AA Milne's Eeyore has apparently caught the mood of the nation.

According to a new survey, a quarter of us fear a hopeless future and one in ten thinks they'd be better off dead.

What a load of rubbish.

Granted there are those who will always ignore the silver lining and look for the cloud, and there will always be a small few who really are dogged by depression. But most of us are too busy getting on with lives to maunder in misery for too long.

Maybe the survey was not a random cross-section.

It was conducted on the internet and those taking part had to answer 80 questions. Let's face it, if you've got nothing else to do other than sit down in front of the computer and answer 80 questions, then I guess maybe life must be pretty empty.

It doesn't help, of course, that we are surrounded by constant images of ridiculously rich people who seem to have done very little for their money. All those dot.com millionaires, all those overpaid footballers and singers. Just look at Posh and Becks. Compare their lives with hard-working nurses and teachers and of course we say life is unfair.

But most grown-ups never expected life to be fair. And if the thought of the unfairness of life, or other peoples' depression is getting you down, then think of all those people in the floods.

Torrents of water and sewage were pouring through their houses. Many of them weren't insured. Even if they were, it's going to take ages to get rid of the dirt and smell and get everything back to normal.

Yet as people paddled down their High Streets or got piggy backs from firemen. Or stood up the their knees in water in their kitchens as their possessions bobbed around them, most of them were amazingly philosophical; good humoured even. Just anxious to get on with the mopping up and in the meantime, managing to laugh and joke about it, even if they must have felt like sitting down and sobbing.

Sometimes it really is being so cheerful - or pretending to be so - that keeps us going. That, and avoiding internet surveys.

WHEN in Rome, the Queen believes in doing just as she would at home. Hence those warnings to her hosts about no garlic, spaghetti or messy Italian sauces.

When my boys were little and started going out to other people's houses, they were told that whatever they didn't eat at home, they had to eat when they were offered it elsewhere. So, bless them, they would manfully eat mushrooms, curry, broad beans and bananas - all of which they genuinely detested - rather than upset their hosts.

It's called good manners, something they understood at six years old.

How strange that the Queen hasn't grasped it yet.

SENATOR Joe Lieberman - running mate of vice president Al Gore in the race to be next American president - would have my vote, if only because of his mum.

Mrs Lieberman, aged 85, has taken to sending the pressmen covering her son's campaign, little goodie bags - containing aspirins and eau de cologne and home-made cookies - to help them through the rigours of the campaign trips.

There's also a little note. "Be kind to my boy," it says.

Well, yes, of course, all journalists are hard-hearted and cynical old hacks. But who could resist a mother's plea like that?

With a mom like that, you can be sure that Mrs Liberman's little boy is off to a flying start. If he doesn't die of embarrassment first...

FOR those under 40, it's probably impossible to understand. But, being exactly the same age as County Durham-born MP, Jackie Lawrence, I know why she gave her new born baby away when she was only 17.

The Sixties might have been swinging in London, but in County Durham - just as in rural Wales where I was - the shame and stigma of an illegitimate child were almost too much to bear.

Young girls from respectable homes would literally rather die than admit what had happened, especially if the young man involved took off, leaving her to face the shame alone. If a girl was abandoned, then she would be the one who would have the community's disgust heaped upon her head - not the absconding lad.

When a young girl was found drowned, poisoned or with her head in the gas oven, you could be almost sure there was a baby on the way. A friend of mine tried to kill herself believing - possibly rightly - that her strict old-fashioned parents would prefer a dead daughter to a live grandchild. Life and attitudes really were really no more enlightened than in a novel by Catherine Cookson or Thomas Hardy.

A potent mixture of shame and practicalities meant it was impossible for a girl to bring up her baby alone.

In just one generation attitudes have done a complete about-turn. When we can accept, almost without blinking, 15-year-old mothers dropping their children off at nursery before going to school themselves, then perhaps the turnaround has gone a mite too far.

But at least these foolish young mothers will be spared a lifetime of heartache that Jackie Lawrence and many of our contemporaries have had to endure.