Iwonder. Have we lost the ability in this country to rejoice in the good fortune of others? To be happy for someone else? Buy a big house and "it's all right for some". Have the big house taken away and "it serves you right".  Let us take the case of Kate Middleton's mum. Her daughter is marrying a prince and so we should be happy for her. But we keep being told that she's a social mountaineer who has been engineering this marriage since the days when Kate was a foetus. and that she used to be an air hostess. a bloody trolley dolly. Pushy cow.  We saw the same sort of thing when Judith Keppel became the first person to scoop the big prize on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Because she lived in Fulham and said "bath" properly, we were invited to despise her on a cellular level. Lucky cow.  and woe betide the celebrity who dares to take a stroll on the beach while on holiday. Look at her! She may have fame, success, money and a pretty face but her swimsuit is disgusting and she has cellulite and we hope that very soon she catches cancer and dies a screaming, agonising death.  Have you ever looked at the comments left by readers on a newspaper's website? They're just a torrent of bile and vitriol. Protected by the anonymity of the internet and freed from the social niceties of physical contact, people go berserk. Lottery winners are particularly vulnerable, it seems. and Nigella Lawson? Fat cow.  No one can earn more than the prime minister, no one can be better looking than Ena Sharples, and good luck to anyone who dares to appear on the television talking like Brian Sewell. Did your parents go to university? Well, you've had all the chances that life can afford, so you can clear off.  This unwillingness to be happy for others is now so acute that we don't even seem to be able to be happy for ourselves. I realise, of course, that people in Birmingham have suffered from this for centuries. Joy is not a Brummie thing. Everything, even if you've made it yourself, is rubbish. There is no word in the West Midlands for "wow".  Now we're all in the same boat, a point that was proved exquisitely on the BBC local news programme that was transmitted in my area on Tuesday evening. It had been an absolutely beautiful day: cloudless, warm and awash with the scent of blossom. The sort of day that made you glad to be alive.  In the olden days, a local news programme would have shown us spring lambs frolicking about on their rickety legs and small children dribbling ice cream in the park. Not any more. Now you could see the news team desperately trying to persuade the water company that the good weather would mean a hosepipe ban very soon. and then when that failed, calling the local hospital to see if anyone had been admitted suffering from sunstroke. "Well, what about a malignant melanoma, then?" Doubtless they will have scanned the Daily Mail to see if there is a link between warm spring sunshine and the arrival of more immigrants, or a catastrophic fall in house prices. and then The Guardian to see if it was yet more conclusive proof of global warming and that soon we would all perish in terrible heathland fires.  The news editor must have been tearing his hair out: "We can't tell people that it's been a lovely warm spring day. There must be some danger. Some terror. Some death. Get me some misery." and boy, oh boy, did one of the reporters come up trumps.  We were told that the warm weather may appear to be lovely but that there is a hidden menace out there: the tick. a perfectly healthy-looking woman was brought in front of the cameras to explain that she had been bitten by a tick two years ago and her life had been ruined as a result. Then a professor was wheeled out to say that the long warm spell followed by a late Easter would cause many more people to be out and about in the countryside and that we were facing a ... please say "perfect storm". She didn't. She said it was a "high-risk situation".  It turns out that w