Following three weeks of columns on credit card use overseas, MasterCard called just a couple of hours before I clambered aboard BA this week to spend some time in London.

Had I bought two airline tickets in Italy the day before? I had not. Fair enough, they said, but someone had, using my card. It would be blocked, i.e. terminated. It is no more. A new card would have to be issued, but I wouldn't be able to collect it until I get back from the UK.

You might think I'd be angry, but I am the reverse. MasterCard accepted without demur that I hadn't bought the airline tickets (I was in Hamilton all day), and said I would be credited with the full amount, no questions asked.

I mentioned last week that I planned to take a Sterling bank draft with me and pay it into my UK chequing account, so all's well that ends well - except that I also received an e-mail from a fellow in London, who said: "I noticed at the end of your article on the 'Card Game' that you were thinking of paying in the UK by cheque. I should just warn you that if you think paying without a chip and pin card is hard, then paying by cheque is even harder. Many establishments refuse to take cheques at all. Check before you buy (pun intended!)."

So, I'll be all-cash in the UK. I like cash. It always works. The only real loss is any mileage I might have accrued on my airline miles account through the use of the card, but that's so small an issue as to not exist, compared to not having to rot in an Italian jail for 150 years, like Bernie Madoff has to (only not in Italy, if you see what I mean).

Clearly, my best bet would be to write three columns about winning the lottery and then buy a lottery ticket.

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Tell me everything you know about Bhutan. You don't know nuffin' about no Bhutan, do you? Nor do I. It's east of St. David's, obviously (or west, if you start in that direction) and some of the men wear pill-box hats and silk robes. That's all I know. What follows is the result of research, and from the very tone of the story, you can tell it's not the kind of thing one makes up.

A country's gross national product is the value of the goods and services the people produce. In rising or falling, it measures national growth and sometimes shrinkage. As a comparative, it lets economists rate nations; per capita, Bermuda's GNP is a world-beater (on average).

In the 1970s, the king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck (it says here), came up with an idea that represented a radical departure from the norm: the notion of gross national happiness. Don't laugh, unless you are extremely happy.

Bhutan, the last Buddhist nation in that part of the world is now "refining the country's guiding philosophy" into what is described as a new political science. The idea of officially measuring happiness has become government policy.

"You see what a complete dedication to economic development ends up in," said Kinley Dorji, secretary of information and communications, referring to the global economic crisis. "Industrialised societies have decided now that GNP is a broken promise."

Under last year's new Constitution, government programmes are to be judged not by the economic benefits they may offer but by the happiness they produce. Government intends to create the conditions to facilitate what Mr. Dorji called, "the pursuit of gross national happiness".

The Bhutanese bhuted out their popular king as an absolute monarch and held their first democratic election a year ago. Giving the king the bhut was part of attaining gross national happiness, Mr. Dorji said. (Unless you're the king, obviously, or his hatter.)

"They resonate well, democracy and GNH," Mr. Dhorji continued. "Both place responsibility on the individual. Happiness is an individual pursuit and democracy is the empowerment of the individual."

Let us wish good luck with that to the Bhutanese people. Democracies elsewhere are not happy places at present. In Bhutan everyone is so deliriously happy that the Government talks to the newspapers, who pass on the happy news. In Bermuda, of course, Government isn't talking to the newspaper because its news isn't always happy.

Does this mean there is a happiness deficit on the Island? Are we experiencing what Buck Turgidson might call a happiness gap? Certainly, no one would describe Immigration, say, or Works & Engineering, at present, as happy places.

"Happy" is not a word much in use these days in Bermuda. When was the last time anyone asked "Are you happy?" and you replied "Happy? I'm ecstatic." Never, that's when.

TCD made me happy this month. Boy, did they. Due to circumstances beyond my control I only had a two-week window to get the car though TCD before I turn 130 next month and become the world's oldest man.

After that, the car's illegal and the radar is going to get me and I'll have to pay $63,000 for being unlicensed. That would have achieved record unhappiness levels round my place, so the pressure was on.

End of Act One: our hero is up a tree.

"You want the test next week?" the woman at TCD asked, and then she burst out laughing. I said: "OK, then I'll sell the car." She said: "You have to get it tested first," a perfect Catch 22, and why sensible people so often find government so incomprehensible.

End of Act Two: our hero is even further up a tree.

Then, the Good Lord and TCD, those twin agencies of power, moved in mysterious ways to enable me to drive about a mile to the new East End testing laboratory the very next morning. It's run by the private sector, so it works like clockwork. Friendly people, efficiency, happiness. The little Car That Can sailed through a stiff test - with an appointment that was not even necessary - and emerged highly relicencable.

Off to TCD. Their new building is about the same size as Buckingham Palace, even though car licensing is supposed to be all online these days. The receiving hall, as is the tradition, has room for 100 angry people, all waiting and furious, but when I went there, no one was waiting for anything, and I was out and off in five minutes flat.

Hats off to Government and Bermuda Emissions (no jokes, please) for making relicensing the car not take a week and a half, like it used to. My happiness couldn't have been grosser.

Now to see what can be done about education, race relations, income inequalities, those awful people up the road, the cost of living, the humidity, and the disappearance of Elvis Presley. One step at a time, perhaps.