Midway through 2006, he became the most unpopular president under the French Fifth Republic since polling began.To the casual visitor to France, a country of high-speed trains, well-stocked municipal flower beds and sit-down lunches, such French glumness is baffling.
If the economy continues its current trajectory, there is no doubt that this glumness will go.
But our economic forecast for America (no recession in 2007, despite a housing slump and general glumness) was a harder call, and proved right.
Some have ascribed Reeves' glumness to his personal life which has been tinged with sadness.
But Biutiful – Iñarritu's first film without writer Guillermo Arriaga – is a sombre drag, maintaining almost unbroken glumness as it heaps woe after woe upon its hero.
But social concern doesn't sentence a photographer to glumness.
Inside the studio, though, the inspirational Peter Sellars, ENO's director-in-residence this season, is bringing a ray of Californian sunlight into the glumness as he rehearses his next production: Purcell's unfinished swansong, The Indian Queen.
You could be forgiven for mistaking such an underwhelmed response for glumness, then, but Hot Chip would rather stay as they are than become pop stars.
My glumness arises from the Vintage paperback, which has Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet plastered on the cover.
The curious combination of glumness and vivacity around the house brought to mind an abject dictatorship gussied up for the benefit of a visiting dignitary.
His writing specializes in the exploration of the minor emotions often slighted by "serious" writers: contentment rather than elation, glumness rather than despair, horniness instead of passion, and, everywhere, a non-existential, completely ordinary loneliness.
