Steve Stack - It Is Just You, Everything’s Not Shit

Sometimes the opportunity presents itself to shrug off your adult years and muck in with the kids. Setting up a Scalextric set, finger painting, rearranging the furniture in a dolls’ house, rolling out plasticine, making mud pies. The list will differ depending on your age and what you got up to when you were a child, but the unadulterated joy of these stolen moments is the same for everyone.

Few foods taste nicer than a blackberry picked from the bramble and popped straight into the mouth, or a strawberry plucked by hand. Modern retailing means that you can buy most types of berry, frozen or fresh(ish) all year round, but not even the owners of Tesco would claim that a raspberry flown over from South Africa tastes as good as one you have picked yourself.

Pick-Your-Own farms are commonplace and scattered across the UK. At the height of summer they are full of seasoned pickers and children toddling around with juice-stained faces. Obviously the aforementioned raspberries and strawberries are popular, as are gooseberries for cooking, but there are many more berries out there to try:

Bilberry. A pain in the backside to harvest but they are very tasty and well worth the bother if you have the patience. They are the key ingredient of Mucky Mouth Pies, a popular Yorkshire dish.

Cloudberry . Largely native (in the form of jam) to IKEA stores nowadays, you can still find this small shrub alongside moors in the north of England and across Scotland, although they are quite scarce. If you are lucky enough to come across some of these deep orange berries, they taste great warmed over ice cream or used in puddings or jam.

Cowberry . A close relative of the cranberry, these really need to be cooked before eating.

Crowberry . You are unlikely to find many of these around (they are far more common in Scandinavia), but they make a nice jelly.

Dewberry . A little like a small blackberry, but with less of a cluster of fruit; these are very difficult to pick without bursting, so it is best to snip the stems and then eat the fruit dipped in sugar.

Juneberry . Quite rare and usually confined to the south of England, these are sweet purple berries and can be eaten straight from the bush.

Rowanberry . Found on the rowan tree, or mountain ash, these resemble elderberries but are larger and bright orange. They are usually cooked and preserved as jam or served as a sauce with meat and game.

Whitebeam . You can often find these on suburban roadsides and they are also a popular garden shrub. The small bunches of red berries are not overly nice, but at least you can say you tried them.

When you are a child, cards are the most boring part of birthdays. What you want are presents, and lots of them. So when you open up that pastel-coloured envelope to reveal a card with a puppy on it, you have to pretend to be grateful. But then a nice crisp tenner falls out and suddenly the moment is saved. We’ve all been there, don’t pretend you haven’t.

Sunday afternoon, no one in the house, black and white movie *on the telly, bar of chocolate on the arm of the sofa. Perfection.

Some of the greatest pleasures in life are the most simple. Standing in a bookshop, surrounded by thousands of volumes, is one such joy.

Ideally, you would be in no rush. It is good to linger when browsing books. You can then identify a suitable section and decide upon your strategy. There are many to choose from:

The Librarian . Strict alphabetical order; you start at A and allow your eye to run across each spine, perhaps aided by a pointing finger. A small “ Tut! ” may venture from your lips when you find something not in the correct order. Selected books will be removed from the shelf, examined and then placed back carefully from whence they came. After twenty minutes you have only reached as far as C, so make a mental note of where you got to for your next visit.

The ADHD . Even though you have all the time in the world, you don’t want to miss anything, so your eyes scan huge sections in one go, lingering briefly on interesting looking jackets or strange titles. You will pick things up but get bored after the first few lines of blurb.

The Favouritist . You make a beeline for your favourite authors and quickly check that they haven’t published a new book without you knowing. They never have. You then proceed to rearrange their titles on the shelf so that other shoppers are more likely to come across them.

The Janitor . A nice leisurely browse, tidying as you go. Booksellers of the world love people like you.

The Gambler . Pure pot luck. You pick up anything that comes to hand using whatever method works for you that day. You end up taking home a bunch of stuff you’ve never heard of just to see what it is like.

The Pigeonholer . You know what you like and like what you know. You head straight for your department of choice, never deviating or being swayed by multibuys or special offers. You are rarely surprised.

The Abramovitch . It is pay-day and you buy everything that looks remotely attractive or interesting and end up with a pile of books that you will struggle to fit on your shelves.

This is the one thing no one minds being woken up early for and is the rare occasion when a continental breakfast isn’t a disappointment.

Once you reach about the age of ten you stop being magnetically attracted to rain puddles. No longer do you jump straight into them, wellies or not. No more do you risk the anger of your mum for getting your socks all wet. You are growing up and jumping in puddles is something you choose, albeit reluctantly, to leave behind.

A frozen puddle, however, is a different thing entirely. It is almost impossible for an adult to walk past one without testing it with their foot in the illicit hope of that beautiful and satisfying crack and the spider web of fractures as you break the surface. It is the sort of moment that fuels an otherwise grey day.

Happy birthday, bubble wrap! Bubble wrap was invented by Marc Chavannes and Alfred Fielding in 1957, making it fifty years old this year (unless you are reading this later than 2007, in which case I am a little surprised by this book’s longevity). Technically, the term ‘bubble wrap’ is trademarked by the Sealed Air Corporation and to avoid any legal wrangling I should refer to it as ‘air cellular cushioning material’, but then you wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

Originally, the inventors were trying to come up with a new type of wallpaper but ended up with a versatile packing material. Little did they know at the time that they had actually created one of the most pleasurable and hypnotic stress-relieving devices known to man, which is, of course, the real reason for its inclusion in this volume. The Sealed Air Corporation seem to have a sense of humour about this aspect of their product and even have a personality test on their website, which determines the sort of person you are by examining the way in which you pop the bubbles. For example, an extroverted and self-motivated person tends to throw bubble wrap on the floor and stamp all over it. I prefer to pop them one at a time, which makes me pragmatic and self-assured, apparently.