This is going to be a strange article, because I have vowed to get through a whole morning without complaining. And that means not complaining about anything. Not about leaving the house without my trusty 31-year-old green pullover because the weather forecast didn’t make clear how damn chilly it would be this morning. Nor about getting on the wrong Tube because the train indicators were on the blink – again! Nor about the pounding pain in the void where my brain should be, because I’m clearly going down with flu and nobody cares.

Nor about the colleague in the lift who said “good morning, Richard!” in that irritatingly chirpy manner. Nor about the other colleague who just grunted when I said “good morning” to her. Miserable old trout! Nor about bashing my thigh on the corner of a desk because a third colleague was wearing a ridiculously distracting frock.

Nor about finding a total of £5.43 in various pockets, when I know for a fact that I took £100 out of a cash machine on Friday. Nor about remembering too late – because nobody thought to remind me at the time – that I had left £40 rolled up in the breast pocket of the shirt I shoved in the washing machine on Saturday. Nor about discovering how comprehensively a mixture of hot water and detergent can reduce banknotes to an indecipherable squidge of papier-mâché, while leaving tomato-sauce strains entirely intact elsewhere on said garment.

Nor about realising that I may need to work until I am 89 because my pension has shrivelled to the size of a hamster’s testicle. Nor about being unable to buy a cup of hot chocolate in London now for less than two quid. Nor about scalding my tongue on the two-quid hot chocolate because nobody warned me it would be that hot.

No, this morning I have endured all these slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune with not so much as a murmur of a grumble. Why? Because I have just read Will Bowen’s A Complaint Free World (Virgin Books) and am a reformed man. I wear his purple wristband with pride. I have “answered my soul’s call”, as he poetically puts it, and embarked joyously on his “21day challenge” to change my life. No longer will I cuss London Underground as I wait for Britain’s most endangered species – a Circle Line train. As Bowen points out with his customary saintly stoicism: “The train will get here when it’s supposed to, and it will be the perfect time.”

As you may have guessed, Bowen is an American evangelist. But his is no complex theological message. Instead he offers a disarmingly simple thesis: if we all stopped moaning, the world would be a better place. Especially as none of us realises how much we grumble. “Complaining can be likened to bad breath,” he writes. “We notice it when it comes out of someone else’s mouth, but not when it comes from our own.”

So Bowen has devised this 21-day challenge. He sends you a purple wristband. Every time you find yourself “complaining, criticising or gossiping”, you swap it to the other wrist. The challenge is to go 21 consecutive days without needing to swap. Most people can’t go 21 minutes. I know people who couldn’t go 21 seconds. But then, I do mingle with a lot of opera critics.

A ridiculous idea? Maybe, but six million people around the world have taken it up. And of course the beauty of accepting Bowen’s “21day Complaint Free Challenge” is that you can’t complain about it.

Besides, I think it raises interesting questions about the way that individuals operate in society. By and large, successful people don’t complain as much as unsuccessful ones. “Well, duh!” you may say. “They have less to complain about. They earn more, they dress better, they bask in esteem, they mate with prettier people, and they generally feel smugger about themselves.”

That’s likely to be true. But did chicken or egg come first? Do they complain less because they are successful, or are they successful because they complain less?

The latter, Bowen contends. He maintains that by giving voice to our gripes, we are merely anchoring ourselves in our own inadequacies. A complaint rarely changes anything, but it does reinforce a person’s negative image (and self-image) as a loser, or at least someone continually dogged by misfortune. When you complain, Bowen says, “you are sending out a message” that you expect bad things. “The Universe hears this and sends you more.” Wooh! Spooky!

Besides which, a complaint is usually uttered more to elicit sympathy than in real expectation that the grievance will be addressed. Indeed, most complaints are made to third parties, not to those who caused the problem. Bowen’s thesis is that, if we stifle our gripes, sooner or later we won’t think them either. Then, as positive-thinking, can-do guys, we can change the world.

It’s a very American attitude, rather like that piffle they still tell children in the States: “Hey, kid, you can be wadever you wannabe.” In the older, more cynical nations of Europe, where people have less faith in their ability to shift the status quo or to improve their station in life, the “culture of complaining” is likely to be seen as a necessary safety valve for pent-up frustrations. We feel stuck in a ghastly mess not of our own creating. We have no way of changing it. So we seek out like-minded grumblers (never hard to find in a British work-place), whip ourselves into a sotto-voce froth of indignation beside the water-cooler, and persuade ourselves that we feel better for “getting that off our chest”.

Multiply that by 60 million people, and you have a whole nation mired in a torpor of gloomy dissatisfaction. Still, far be it for me to complain about the state of Britain. Not while I wear this wristband, anyway. I’m giving it until lunchtime, incidentally, then it’s going in the bin. The strain of being so bloody nice is making me feel ill.

Tax-free perks for the Lords? Excellent

A clever-clogs colleague suggests that my attempt to eliminate complaints from my discourse will make the completion of this column impossible. Not at all! For instance, far from whingeing about the £308 of tax-free perks claimed each day by many members of the House of Lords, I rejoice to see peers who are so often portrayed as semi-senile geriatrics displaying a streetwise guile that must have Essex’s sharpest secondhand car dealers gasping in admiration. And far from criticising a system that allows this alleged expenditure to be claimed without the boring need to produce receipts, I am delighted to note that the time-honoured mantra – “a gentleman’s word is his bond” – still holds good in some elevated corners of the realm.

As for the revelation that much the same philosophy covers the checking (or rather, the not-checking) of expense claims at New Scotland Yard – well, what could be more reassuring for the public than knowing that members of the Metropolitan Police hold each other’s integrity in such high regard?

You see, it’s easy to be upbeat about our great nation! But do you mind if I extract my head from this bucket of sand now? It’s stuffy in here. Not that I’m complaining, of course.

McWarrior Queen

How astonishing, someone said on the radio yesterday, that with so much building work going on to enlarge the Tube station under King’s Cross and St Pancras, prior to the launch of Eurostar services today, nobody should have stumbled across the remains of Boadicea (or Boudicca, as historians now call her), since the feisty queen is reputed to be buried under Platform 8 at King’s Cross.

Actually, it’s not so astonishing. Earlier this year archaeologists suggested that the bones of the first great British heroine are in a much more distinguished location. Underneath a McDonald’s on the outskirts of Birmingham.

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