Professor Robert Winston at the Corn Exchange Wednesday 15th June

Lord Winston rocks up smiling, looking like someone’s grandfather, sporting a pink shirt. We’ve seen him present fascinating documentaries on the telly, and the packed house is eager to hear his views on ‘What Makes Us Happy’.

He stands in shadow. The focus is on the screen, and his reassuring voice. Because it’s not about him, it’s about the science.

“Happiness is a complicated issue” he says; to do with upbringing and neural connections, and relative to circumstance. He illustrates how we carve our neural pathways with the image of a bridge being slung across a gorge and walked upon repeatedly. He shows us African children with HIV, playing happily with balloons. He talks about evolution and sex, revealing graphically why size matters. He touches on empathy, body language, humour, immunity, healing, memory, pleasure and resilience. A graph shows us how happiness declines until our mid-forties, and then rises again. There is hope for us all.

He’s Chairman of the Royal College of Music. He plays Bach, Beethoven, and Mahler, and discusses the effect of music on our brains. He shows us Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and talks about J Arthur Prufrock. He’s witty and interesting.

Winston has devoted his life to fertility studies, and is Chairman of the Genesis Research Trust. Child development is important to him. He says we should play more music to children, and that society’s fear of interacting with them is unhealthy. “Happiness very largely depends on how we are brought up” he says. We nod, and hope for the best.

Professor Lord Robert Winston, polymath, philanthropist; it was an honour to have you at our Festival. Keep up the good work and the helpful science, for all of us.

Gail Foster