Out of sorts without a personal hinterland

I'M looking for a hinterland. They say we all need one, and more people say we need one at this time of year.

I'M looking for a hinterland. They say we all need one, and more people say we need one at this time of year.

That's more people saying it at this time of year: they want us to have a hinterland all year around.

But the H-talk picks up in January, when people start auditing your life as well as their own and finding gaps where they would rather see a hinterland. They really mean hobbies, but they know that if they say that out loud, you will laugh in their face and not invite them to your parties.

Developing a hinterland has a whiff of something exotic and potentially interesting, whereas a hobby sounds dangerously like stamp collecting. Most of us have nothing against philately. (Yes, I know it's technically the study, not the collecting, of stamps, but you get the point.) Most of us have been there, done that. But we were eight. With plaits.

For a long time now, hobbies have seemed to me a little like taking a packed lunch to the office every day for 40 years: not to be countenanced by grown-ups except in extremis. Certainly butterfly-collecting has never appealed as an alternative to anything, let alone to life.

Yet the hinterland advocates argue such pursuits offer a chance to discover your true self, or at least compensate for a disappointing job or a boring marriage. In the process, they have elevated to hobby status a number of activities that were formerly regarded as work, or at least part and parcel of a marriage. Like crocheting and cooking, and needlework and growing vegetables.

Next the H-sayers will be suggesting that making beds or dusting the furniture are potentially transforming exercises that offer an alternative to wage-slavery in the office. Look what's happened to walking in the past 30 years.

Hikes through Cornwall or the Hindu Kush have always been regarded as non-essential, non-work activities, but earlier generations would have laughed in your face if you had suggested walking around the suburbs wearing a pedometer was part of your voyage to a hinterland.

None of this, of course, will stop the audit brigade from lecturing us on the need to find a balance through bee-keeping or cataloguing 50 years of faded family photographs. To them, happiness will always be a hobby, and stamp collecting the route to personal peace; tilling the hinterland will always outrank cultivating the front paddock, no matter how rich the soil or how interesting the toil.