It was raining when I arrived in the happiest village in Britain, and that's putting it mildly. Water was sluicing from the sky, sending the happiest villagers in Britain scuttling for shelter; several of Britain's happiest Range Rovers drenched me as they sped through puddles. "People come from all over, especially from London, and they say, 'Oh, isn't it a lovely place?'" a local businessman called David told me as we kept dry in his office. "We've got fields, cows, sheep. Deer, sometimes. I suppose it's lovely. You just don't think about it so much when you're here all the time." He sighed. "It's a miserable place, this country. That's just my personal opinion."

I don't know what I'd expected to find in Oakley, outside Basingstoke (a sun with the face of a chuckling baby, like in Teletubbies?), but it wasn't this. According to the government, Oakley has the highest quality of life in the nation, judged on 37 criteria including traffic accidents, household wealth, overcrowding, air quality and "potential years of life lost", a measure of premature mortality.

Of course, translating that into "Britain's happiest village" (as all of us in the media do, every time such surveys are released) means making a few assumptions about what ought to make us happy: a home in the country, with a duck pond, two pubs, a church and a grocer, four miles from a fast rail link to London. Weirdly, the people of Oakley seem to subscribe to this view - but only as it applies to their neighbours. "People are happy here, I think," said David, who didn't see himself as a particularly happy person. "It's because there are lots of old people, and not a lot of young people," said a young member of staff at the Fox pub. She didn't seem happy, either.

The world's happiest people are always other people. In a survey last year asking people to rate their levels of joy, Denmark topped the list (Burundi was bottom; the UK a respectable 41 out of 178). The year before, it was Puerto Rico: it's by no means always the wealthiest nations that do best. Perhaps it's preferable not to be in first place, though. The idea that people are having a better time somewhere else might be galling. But the idea that we might be the happiest people - that this is as good as it gets, and we'd better learn how to savour it? Could we tolerate the pressure?

One person who can is my friend Solana Larsen, who's both Puerto Rican and Danish and, pleasingly for the researchers, one of the happiest people I know. In her spare time, she runs PuertoDansk, the Danish-Puerto Rican society. So far, she's managed to recruit only five other people who fit the bill genetically, but membership is open to everyone else, too, on the principle that "ethnicity is a state of mind". "My Puerto Rican family is envious that I don't need to worry about falling into abject poverty, because the social welfare system in Denmark would take care of me," she says, "and in Denmark they envy anyone who can move their hips and dance." But is she happy? "I'm one of the happiest people I know."

I've joined the society, and look forward to becoming permanently joyful soon.

· oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com