COMMENT: Stop telling us Wolverhampton is miserable!

It's very interesting to note that this latest study, in which we Wolverhampton folk are all revealed to be as miserable as, well, a Wolves fan on Transfer Deadline Day (that's the most miserable thing I could think of) came out on February 2.

Now, film fans know that February 2 is Groundhog Day. In the film of the same name, Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who has to live the same day over and over again.

• Wolverhampton 'officially' the most miserable place in the UK ... Again

Well, the release of this latest 'study' – I feel that quote marks are necessary here, because really this is 'a bunch of graphs designed to facilitate yet more Wolverhampton-bashing' – is certainly starting to make me feel like I am living my life as a series of repetitive cycles.

Because at the moment, I think one of these pieces has to be coming out at the rate of one every six months.

Actually, scratch that. I've just had a look and the last one came out on October 27 and the one before that on August 7. So it's actually one every three months. That's slightly creepy.

So what do we make of this latest assault on our good name? Well, it comes from a place called the Office Of National Statistics (ONS), which certainly sounds like a fun place to work. I imagine that their office parties last for days.

It tells us we are:

• The least happy people in the whole of England

• The second-least satisfied people in England

• The third-from-last people for feeling worthwhile in England

The ONS has spent the last three years gathering data so that they can state, with absolute authority, which people in England rate themselves as happy, which people feel that they possess personal well-being, which people feel a sense of life satisfaction, and which people feel they are worthwhile, in various points throughout England. They have then typed it all up and published it with a big fanfare.

As the saying goes, it really is nice work if you can get it, isn't it?

You already know how this is going to end up, of course, because it's the same place every time. Wolverhampton is the most miserable city – or rather, the least happy, which I'm sure is pretty much the same thing – in the country.

I have a theory why these identical studies seem to keep being offered up as something new. It's because they think that if they keep saying it, eventually we'll start thinking it and they'll be proved right.

Now, on the one hand, a perfectly sensible reaction here would be to posit the theory that anyone who chooses to work in statistics has to be insane anyway. And I say that as someone who has just tried to read the Excel spreadsheets from which this study has emerged. It was like being assaulted in an alley by a gang of rogue numbers and decimal points. I already feel slightly unhinged and I only read it for ten minutes.

The other reaction is to keep repeating that Wolverhampton isn't miserable to live in, if you actually live in it, and that the three years' worth of data clearly came from planted actors all pretending that they drink in the Hog's Head. But then it becomes even more like Groundhog Day.

Here goes anyway. In the wider Black Country, of which Wolverhampton is a proud constituent, the bare joyous facts are there for all to see – the comedy acts, the music, the indigenous grub and dialect, the thriving manufacturing sector, the proud history the cost of living, the vibrancy of culture past and present, and above all, the baltis. And we're right smack-bang in the middle of all that. Why be unhappy?

The only reason I can think of to be unhappy is that we seem to have a bunch of London study-compilers stalking us. Even now, I feel like I'm being watched...

Ah, it's okay, it's just The Editor making sure I keep the word rate up.

We also score very low on satisfaction too, there was another branch of the study commissioned to cover that. Not exactly a great surprise though, really, is it?

Because if there's one thing you can usually expect about unhappy people, it's that they're also generally pretty dissatisfied.

What's amazing is that the least satisfied people in England live in London. Now, far be it from me to suggest this, but maybe they're all the people who work for the Office of National Statistics?

We are also, apparently, the third-worst place in England for not feeling like we are living worthwhile lives. The other four places at the bottom are, again, all from London. I refer you to my previous joke.

So, once again, they tell us that we are miserable and hacked off. And yet the interesting thing (well, relatively interesting, you have to understand how many spreadsheets I had to look at) amid all of this grim inevitability, is that Wolverhampton scores the lowest for anxiety.

Now, you would surely think that this would not be the case. It stands to reason that if we're the most unhappy, and if we're right down there in the doldrums as far as satisfaction is concerned, then surely that would be a cause for anxiety too.

I mean, factor in the fact that the city is being impossibly squeezed by the Government taking a chainsaw to civic finances, our local football team is having a season that could be politely described as 'stop-start', and there's still no sign of a full Slade reunion... Well, you'd assume we'd all be tearing our hair out.

Nope. Apparently 58.5 per cent of people in Wolverhampton rate their anxiety level as being zero out of 10, or one out of 10. We are officially the least anxious people in England, and are presumably going to get some kind of sash.

Well, I have a theory why we're feeling so anxiety-free.

It's because we don't spend a nano-second of our time caring about what some Whitehall number-crunchers in a stuffy basement office compiling endless spreadsheets, say about us.