Happily, I discovered dance music soon after, wherein the most depressing sentiment expressed was an anxiety that one might accidentally Rock the Boat a bit too much as one “rocked on with ya dancin’!” Still, there was the unspoken assumption that should one “tip the boat over!”, it would soon be set aright again.

Then came punk and — oh my Lord — I found myself in the eye of the phlegmy hurricane, pretending like mad to like the rotten noise in order to keep my job on the NME. I don’t remember how many nights I listened to numbskulls who couldn’t even pluck up the enthusiasm to be nihilists screeching about suicide, swastikas and sicking up — and then, like a kid set free from school, I would rush back to my septic bedsit, pull off my bondage trousers and dance around in my underwear to the Isley Brothers until sheer molten joy claimed me back as one of its renegade tribe.

I’ve been addicted to happy music — which generally means dance music — ever since. And the more I’m told how mindless it is, the more stubbornly I cleave to it, and the more beauty I find in the likes of Lola’s Theme and Es Samba. Not only do I find house music a lot more aesthetically beautiful than hearing a bunch of pallid misery-goats bleating on endlessly about how horrid Mom’n’Dad were, I actually find it more intelligent than the bedsit-bellyaching of Coldplay, Radiohead and Snow Patrol. With house, the listener is actively involved in the interpretation of the piece (Pseud’s Corner, here I come!) by the very blanks that are left in it, rather than being purely acted upon by the unremitting angst of the work. Whereas when I hear a Radiohead record, I come away feeling like Thom Yorke’s analyst, and frankly that’s something I’d want paying for, to say the least, as opposed to paying for the pleasure myself by purchasing his records. (Of course the exception to this rule is Mr Morrissey, but then Mr Morrissey is an exception to every rule including The One That No One Over Forty Years Of Age Should Wear A Quiff and The One That No One Should Diss Oliver Cromwell, Ever.)

Only recently, in order to impress my new friend, the strange, brilliant and beautiful humorist Natalie Haynes, have I tried to appreciate depressing music again. But it doesn’t look promising. Natalie likes sad, modern country music, and in an effort to introduce me to the genre gave me a record called Return of the Grievous Angel, in which a bunch of modern country artistes (“codern”? “muntry”?) reinterpret the songs of the late Gram Parsons. All I know about this bloke, basically, is that he’s got a great Christian name, a manky surname, and he died. But I tried, I really did.

Recognising the title of a song I had heard before, I put on the Cowboy Junkies singing Ooh, Las Vegas. I tried to appreciate the dread, sorrow, compulsion and longing for redemption in the eerily beautiful rendition. But within 90 seconds, I’m afraid I was thinking about the brilliant trip to Vegas I had five years ago — the glass-bottomed helicopter ride over the Strip at night, the shopping, the gambling, the allyou-can-eat, round-the-clock buffets! I really, REALLY wanted to go back again, which I’m sure isn’t the way the record was meant to make me feel, so out of respect I took it off and before long was scrabbling through my records to see if I had a version of Viva Las Vegas! by Elvis instead. But I did try to get in the miz-mode, that’s the point!

Sad records are best enjoyed as a solitary vice, but blues-inducing books are notoriously used as a mating call; it used to be bleak French Penguins worn in the back pocket, which is probably not as much fun as it sounds. Morbid movies, of course, work for lonelyhearts as well as blind-dates — blinded by tears, naturally. Misery loves company after all, and you could court a good chunk of the depressed singles of urban Britain by spinning out the canons of Neil LaBute, Lukas Moodysson and Todd Solondz.

The last of these wags currently has a film doing the rounds, Palindromes, which starts with a funeral and then really gets going, downhill all the way. Following the adventures of a thoroughly wretched 12-year-old girl (played by eight different actors; presumably the part was simply too much of a downer for one mere thesp to shoulder alone) adrift in the Dark Heart Of America, it features — sniggering all the way — paedophilia, gun crime physical and mental handicap, but more than anything it features the self-satisfaction of Solondz, which shines through in every frame.

And here’s the rub. I don’t object to people having a good old wallow in depressing films, music and juggling till the cows come home — but I do object in their dismissing me as mindless just because I prefer to look on the bright side of life. The idea that people like me are in some way “naive” because we like to enjoy ourselves without going to the dark heart of somewhere-or-other is way off; on the contrary, it is the devotees of Misery Entertainment who seem shockingly unworldly, when you scratch it a little. It’s like one day they realised that there was ALL THIS REALLY NASTY STUFF IN THE WORLD and never recovered, forever worrying away at the dark side. You just want to shake them, after a bit; get over it and smell the roses, sunshine!

One thing’s for sure; at the end of the day the only things that are certain are death and taxes, and when I think about people addicted to Miz-Ent I always picture them — a million suicidal songs, mirthless movies and navelgazing novels down the line — finally on their deathbed. They say that on your deathbed the main thing you regret is not having had more sex — is this true of hookers and rent-boys, do you think? — but I bet you regret that you didn’ t have more FUN too.

Odds are that no one’s ever thought: “‘Oh, I so wish I’d got around to that really depressing book/song/film!” Because now, as your life draws to a close, you’re living in your very own Todd Solondz film — and all you’ll want to do, I bet, is feel the sun on your face, neck half an E and hear the uplifting strains of the most ecstatic Kylie song imaginable. But by then, it will be too late. And that really will be the most killing joke of all.

julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk