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 life’s small pleasures: everything from the distinctive delight of holding a child’s 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.

What This Book Is For

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. They’re 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 what’s really going on in it and why it touches and moves us and makes us smile. It’s 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 don’t automatically and naturally know how to enjoy ourselves. But the pursuit of pleasure is a skill which we need to learn: it’s 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. We’re 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.