The School of Life - Small Pleasures

Small Pleasures

So often, we exhaust ourselves and the planet in a search for very large pleasures - while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which - if only we paid more attention - could daily bring us solace and joy at little cost and effort. But we need some encouragement to focus our gaze. This is a book to guide us to the best of lifes small pleasures: everything from the distinctive delight of holding a childs hand to the enjoyment of disagreeing with someone to the joy of the evening sky; an intriguing, evocative mix of small pleasures that will heighten our senses and return us to the world with new-found excitement and enthusiasm.

There are many little things that charm us a favourite old jumper, whispering in the dark or the taste of a fig when we happen to have the time to notice. Theyre the small pleasures of everyday life. This book looks at 52 of them in detail, perhaps one for every week of the year. Usually, small pleasures are not widely celebrated or even much talked about. Every chapter puts one such moment of enjoyment under a kind of magnifying glass to find out whats really going on in it and why it touches and moves us and makes us smile. Its a search for the bigger meaning secretly lurking in everything we find nice. Small pleasures turn out not to be small at all: they are points of access to the great themes of our lives.

It can at first sound slightly strange to say that we dont automatically and naturally know how to enjoy ourselves. But the pursuit of pleasure is a skill which we need to learn: its something that we can get better at. And small pleasures are the things to start with.

Not all the small pleasures in your life will be listed here, of course. Were seeking to build a philosophy of appreciation that encourages us to explore more deeply and get more out of the many sources of happiness that are currently a bit neglected. Small pleasures, we believe, are pleasures whose true importance is not yet properly understood. This book is a step in a wider cultural project to move these small pleasures from the margins closer to the centre of our collective consciousness and our lives.

The fishmongers window display is alluring, yet one doesnt normally go in. But when one does, one wonders why one doesnt visit more often.

Waiting to be served, one is struck by the beauty and strangeness of the fish and sea creatures on offer on the beds of ice: the oyster that somehow generates its own home, rocky on the outside, suggestively smooth and polished within. For a moment one contemplates the destiny of the sole, one of whose eyes has to migrate round its head on the path to maturity, and the monkfish, whose huge, toothy mouth and puny body are repellent to look at but whose flesh is delicious when roasted and drizzled with olive oil.

They seem so alien. But in a universe composed almost entirely of gas and rock circulating in the endless nothingness of space we are their cousins, with whom we briefly cohabit the surface zones of earth. In the recent history of the cosmos, we shared common ancestors, whose progeny became diversely the octopus, the sea bream or evolved gradually into solicitors, psychotherapists and graphic designers.

Imagine spending this thing called life embodied in a lobster, encountering the world through its tiny peppercorn eyes, which offer a field of vision much wider but less focused than ours. There would have been the momentous day one dug a burrow beneath a basalt rock in the soft mud of the sea floor in Fidden Bay, off the Isle of Mull. Then there would have been the drama of shedding our exoskeleton. We would have had to master the laborious process of reproduction, when the male has to pierce the females stomach to deposit his spermatophores. Finally there was the catastrophic curiosity that two days ago tempted us into a lobster pot.

The fish shop isnt simply a place to pick up calamari rings or some cod steaks, it is also a place of re-enchantment. We suffer a fatally easy tendency to become jaded. Things that are familiar lose their power to entice the imagination. Then, looking into the eye of a mullet, or contemplating the internal architecture of a skate fin, one is reconnected with the elegant and bizarre inventiveness of nature. Weve been too hasty; weve overlooked almost everything. The world is full of fascination; there is so much to be explored. And we have been led to this renewed appetite by the head of a fish.

Each item has been gathered from the chambers of the sea, distant rivers, or prised from submerged rocks. The speckled trout were reared in a former gravel pit in Lincolnshire. The mackerel were caught by a trawler on the Dogger Bank and landed at Peterhead. The sea bass were hauled onto the cobbled pier at Crail and speeded in a refrigerated van down the M90 and the A1(M) with a brief halt in the HGV parking lot at Wetherby Service Station.

And here they all are cleansed, gutted, chilled and artfully arranged. Nature has been civilised and made attractive by ice, metal, glass, tiles, slabs of marble and by constant cold water and the sharpest knives. The fish shop hints at an ideal that we would like perhaps to pursue more broadly: the sense that trouble has been rinsed away, and the desirable good bit will be delivered into your life neatly wrapped in delicately glazed white paper.

Visiting the fishmonger leads one to sketch little plans of moral reform: in another, slightly better, life, one would go there all the time. Wed become adept at preparing certain dishes. Being here, one makes fleeting, initial contact with a latent self who poaches salmon, tosses a lobster salad, drizzles olive oil and whose friends come round for bouillabaisse. There is a potential future version of oneself who starts to come to life in the fishmonger who lives on light, nutritious fishy meals and whose brain is bathed in their sympathetic briny fluids. Life as a whole will remain radically imperfect, one knows, but if one took slightly more care around eating, even if lots of bits of ones life were bad, if one could come in here and get some sole wrapped up by the man in the blue apron and go home, and take the art of living more seriously, then one would be closer to being the person one should always have been. The fish shop pleasure originates in very small points of departure the smell of the salt and water, the frigid air wafting from the beds of ice, the silvery skin of an Atlantic salmon and grows into a large idea: respect for civilisations that have more time for things that are simultaneously delightful and wholesome.

As the plane makes its gradual descent, you see much of the island from your window: the cliffs at one end, the long golden curve of a remote beach, olive groves, an isolated village, a patch of woodland, the ferry wharf constructed in the 1970s, the whitewashed air traffic control tower. Theres just one carousel at the terminal. People seem to know each other. Its only a short ride in the hired car into the small main town. You drive past the shopping centre, the villa with the old tree in front, the primary school, the restaurant that specialises in seafood, the town hall And theres a strange, instinctive feeling of wanting to live here. You wont really, in all probability, for a lot of reasons big and small. But the thought of being happy here is saying something important which deserves to be decoded and which might not ultimately involve plans for relocation.