If you're going to be grumpy, be miserable about what matters

Will the mood pass, or is grumpiness your default position – a morose, slightly sad and dissatisfied turn of mind that you habitually write off as being something with which you were born, like brown hair or blue eyes?

Let's face it, most people who are grumpy by nature don't go around apologising for it, whereas the rest of us who have the odd Eeyore-ish day or hour often beat ourselves up mercilessly for having not only looked like someone else got all the lollipops but having perhaps also taken our sour mood out

on others.

Actor Richard Wilson found a late-career goldmine in playing the perennially miserablist Victor Meldrew of One Foot In The Grave. His signature phrase "I don't believe it!" passed into the English language as the motto for every other ageing grump who found themselves at odds with the modern world.

It would be stretching a point to say Wilson made being a whingeing old so-and-so trendy, but his rantings did beget an inexplicable and lucrative genre of misery-guts venting in the media.

First of all came successive and mind-numbing series of Grumpy Old Men programmes, in which the likes of Bob Geldof and Jeremy Clarkson opined on how completely rubbish everything was. (This from two of the planet's most irritating men of any age...)

Gripe followed world-weary gripe, and targets included everything from flat-pack furniture to television talent shows and mobile phones.

Grumpy Old Women followed, with a line-up led by journalist Janet Street Porter and comedian Jenny Eclair, but sadly with nothing more scintillating or hilarious to say than the men.

Unaccountably, this female moanfest has had several successful series and nationwide stage tours, and is currently resident in the West End.

As if all that were not enough, then came along a series of books sharing the world "Crap" in their title – Crap Towns, Crap Jobs and Crap Cars, etc etc. The wagon rolled on with Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a full-frontal attack on the state of the country's spelling and punctuation and a book which spawned many imitations.

Just as it looked as though radio and TV (if not publishing) might have got tired of all this nostalgia for the "good old days" and self-righteous moaning about life as we know it, an Australian psychologist has pitched the cat right in with the pigeons by telling us that being a grump is a good thing.

Prof Joe Fargas of the University of New South Wales ran research which showed that people in a bad mood outperformed jolly people in memory tests, making fewer mistakes and communicating better events shown to them in films and told in stories.

Whereas good mood and positivity has a good effect on creativity, flexibility and co-operation, negative mood triggered more attentive, careful thinking, and greater attention to detail and to the external world. The more negative people were also better communicators and better at making a case in a written argument.

While it might have its uses in academic circles, it's not a good thing for this "it's fine to be a grump" story to get out, is it

Unfortunately, it will spread like Japanese Knotweed among all the wrong people. The Prof should have kept his findings to a very tight circle of people like himself, but instead he's unleashed a licence to all would-be groaners to give us the dubious benefit of their dark imaginings and evil-eyed view of the world.

Too late to argue that Ikea furniture, dropped aitches, ankle chains and iPods do not spell the end of civilisation, and an ability to moan articulately does not mean you are a god-given arbiter of taste in fashion, language, popular culture or anything else. It just means you spend a lot more time nit-picking and festering in your armchair before waving your arms about and making your point more loudly than anyone of milder disposition.

Respectable academic research is one thing; encouraging natural whiners to whine even more is quite another... especially with World Cup humiliation surely on the cards.

Of course, moderate moaning in moderation can be therapeutic; friends and spouses do it to each other on a reciprocal basis all the time – but not continually if they want the relationships to last.

Those of a grumpy nature who really can't mend their ways should not waste their irritation on flat packs, but get stuck into a few subjects that matter.

If you keep your powder dry for the good fights, like why education needs more money, not less, you'd actually be doing the rest of us a favour and would pretty soon find yourselves falling out of the category of grumpy old man/woman and into the perfectly respectable pigeon-hole of serious social commentator. You might even get a job in the media.