By Christina Lamb

“What makes women happy?” I asked my not-quite-seven-year-old son. He thought for a moment, then replied: “Flowers, hugs, kisses, and getting things half-price.” I looked at him aghast. The first three were fine, though I might have added poetry and chocolate, and I do have something of a weakness for expensive handbags. But was I really bringing him up to think I derive as much pleasure from a bargain as a lingering kiss and a hand-tied bouquet?

Besides, I’m supposed to be a hardened war correspondent, addicted to adrenaline, the kind of mummy who always goes on the most death-defying rides at theme parks. It’s a job that means I am often away in dangerous places. After weeks abroad, nothing makes me happier than my son’s laughing blue eyes, or waking in the warmth of my husband’s arms.

These days everyone seems to be talking about happiness. Books appear about it, schools even teach it. I asked my closest female friends what makes them happy, and they said great sex and walking barefoot on sand. Both would be high on my list -– as indeed would be great sex on sand. But as most of my travels tend to be in countries like Afghanistan, where ablution facilities are often a bucket and a hole, happiness can be a bath with lots of smellies. And, oh, the joy of clean bed sheets, particularly white Egyptian cotton, and fluffy pillows.

Yet some of my happiest moments have been in the midst of war or conflict. Living on the edge brings out the best and worst in people and often heightens experiences. During the war in Iraq, my interpreter was a chubby fellow called Edward, whose usual job was running dolphin shows in Kuwait City and whom I had hired solely because he had told me a romantic story of rescuing his girlfriend from Baghdad during the Gulf war. As we waited for Basra to fall, he kept me endlessly amused with stories of training Ukrainian dolphins. One evening we drove to the unsightly port of Umm Qasr to find the sea lit up by luminescent fish, somehow made all the more magical by the boom of guns not far away.

The most enchanting afternoon I’ve had recently was visiting Masood Khalili, the son of one of Afghanistan’s most famous poets, after a day of riots had left Kabul tense. His family home is one of the few in the capital to have survived the decades of war. We lounged on cushions in the small domed room that had been his father’s meditation room, nibbling dried mulberries, and let his mellifluous voice wash over us, reading poems of love.

Of course, the problem with spending a lot of time on the edge is that normal life seems tame. On the other hand, when you narrowly escape death – as I did in June when I was caught in a Taliban ambush in Helmand – merely being alive can give you a high. Afterwards, lying on the desert sand looking up at the Milky Way and thousands of stars you never see in London, I felt absurdly happy. Back home, all sorts of simple pleasures seem to have acquired added delight. Among them the smell of a new book, particularly a novel by a favourite writer, such as Haruki Murakami, to curl up in bed with. Better still, with the sound of the sea outside, or, failing that, Damien Rice’s haunting song The Blowers Daughter on my iPod.

I’d never really thought about what happiness was until, in my mid-twenties, I went to live in Brazil, a country Federico Fellini called “the Last Happy Nation”. From the moment I stepped off the aeroplane and felt the balmy sea air on my cheeks and the smell of red pepper trees, I fell in love. The newspaper for which I was working was running a series on poverty and asked me to go to one of Rio’s worst favelas, or shantytowns. I chose Rocinha, the oldest and largest favela, which sprawls across the hillside overlooking the stunning beach of Sao Conrado.

Life in Rocinha seemed truly awful, particularly for women. I wandered round shacks with no running water, dodging the trickle of stinking sewage and jumping at the occasional rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire from daily battles between rival drug gangs. Police did not dare enter these places. There was no sign of the menfolk – they were off downing what little they earned on cachaca, sugar-cane rum.

Brazil has the world’s biggest gap between rich and poor, and just below Rocinha the beach was lined with fabulous apartments that were among the most expensive real estate in Latin America. I expected the mothers of Rocinha to complain. But one after another assured me: “Life is good. The sun always shines. Rich or poor, we’ve all got the beach. And look at our view!”

It was indeed an unbeatable view. Everyone seemed to be laughing or dancing to samba Some women were busy sewing costumes of spangles for the carnival parade, which they had spent most of the year looking forward to. I had always been motivated by adventure rather than wealth, but that day in the Rio slums taught me that money is nothing to do with happiness.

It’s a view shared by the rulers of Bhutan, where they recently introduced the concept of gross national happiness (GNH). After years of isolation, people worried that opening up the Buddhist land might destroy its cultural identity and spirituality. So the government came up with GNH – the idea being that economic development should not mean sacrificing elements important to people’s happiness, such as family, the environment or free education.