SERENDIPITY. It’s a word I’ve never been that keen on.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes it thus: ‘The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.’

Maybe the reason I’m not keen is because the meaning has been corrupted over the years. Go anywhere in the UK and somewhere along a street there’s bound to be a card/gift/craft shop called Serendipity.

Sunflowers will be a recurring theme, as will framed pictures of bicycles leant against French shop fronts.

Alternatively, Serendipity is the name that a spinster would give to a stray tomcat she had adopted/kidnapped and which she feeds tins of tuna and saucers of double Guernsey cream.

Serendipitous for the spinster, perhaps, but not so for the tomcat, which only wants to do what he was made to do – tom.

I’m always reminded of the word whenever I think of a place called Moor Pond. It was miles from where we lived but we used to go and play there occasionally.

It wasn’t really on the moors but behind Oakworth Park (which was a warren of hand-built caves) and with the woods beyond.

Dibbie, a mate of mine who was in last week’s story, once found a VHS video cassette in the woods. It was called Steamy Kitchen Lust and was about an extremely popular plumber.

Although the discovery could be construed as serendipitous – and indeed, so too could the constant good luck of the featured plumber – this story is not about the video or its content.

The area called Moor Pond was a hilly wasteland that people used as a motorcycle-scrambling track. The pond itself was surrounded by trees and looked as if it could have starred in a public information film about the dangers of ‘dark and lonely water’ with a voiceover from Donald Pleasence.

Further up the valley there was a network of even spookier, even more heavily wooded ponds that could have starred in an aquatic version of The Blair Witch Project – perhaps Marine Boy v. The Blair Witch.

It was there that one day myself, my cousin, Foyi, and our mate, Airey, decided to go.We often broke away from our comfort zone of the terrace houses of Fell Lane, the football pitch and bowling greens of Lund Park and the bucolic quietude of Old Mouse Wood (really called Holme House Wood, but if you say it fast, it sounds like ‘old mouse’ – and isn’t it a better name?) and ventured afar. You could do that as a kid in those days, even in England.

We thought nowt of getting on our bikes and pedalling the seven miles or so round trip to Cowling Pinnacle, the youngest in the gang about seven or eight, and it wasn’t unknown for us to set off somewhere at 9am and not return until teatime.

That’s what we’d done on our Mill Pond trip. We’d been in the caves of Oakworth Park and annoyed the parkie by running across the bowling green (parkies were there to be annoyed – it was in their job description). We’d been on the swings and through the woods (no video cassettes for us) and we headed to Mill Pond on the offchance that some rich kid would be putting his Kawasaki 125 trials bike through its paces and we could laugh when he fell off.

But there were no motorcyclists on that day. The place was deserted.

Whenever male kids come across an expanse of water – and I believe this is true the world over – be it river, sea, canal, well or moor pond, there is one of two things they will do: either throw something in or, if they can’t find anything, spit into it.

It’s a natural instinct with them – they were born to chuck or to gob.

We spent half an hour gobbing and chucking stones and sticks in. Then Foyi said: ‘Look at this.’

He was at the water’s edge, poking around in a muddy patch with a stick.

‘What are they?’ asked Airey.

‘They look like artillery shells,’ I said, ever the optimist.

‘Nah, not heavy enough. Feel like they’re made of glass.’

‘Bottles?’ said Airey. ‘Hey, we might be able to get a deposit back and get some separates.’

Airey and Foyi, being a year older than me, had started smoking. Separates were single fags from a packet – usually No. 6 – that the shopkeeper or newsagent had opened specifically to sell at an inflated price to under-age kids who couldn’t afford a whole packet.

Talk about private enterprise, eh? And that was before Thatcherism.

So we took off our pumps and socks and waded into the mud.There must have been about 24 bottles just lying there. We pulled them out and put them in a pile on the path. Then we carried them to a less muddy part of the pond and washed each of them out.

They were beautiful old bottles, made of thick, pale-green glass. Some had the chamber in the neck with a glass marble in it, which controlled the pouring. Others had the raised stamps of brand names and porcelain stoppers, like the Grolsch bottles of today.

‘These’ll be worth a fortune,’ said Airey, dreaming of packets of 20 instead of separates.

‘There’s that antique shop down Slaymaker Lane – let’s take them there,’ I said.

‘Good idea,’ said Foyi. ‘But we can’t take all of them. Perhaps two each. And if they want to buy them, we’ll come back for the others.’

We hid the others under some bushes and each took two of the most interesting ones.

All the way down Slaymaker Lane we talked about what we’d get when the shopkeeper handed over the wad of cash.

‘I’m gonna put it towards my trials bike,’ said Foyi.

‘Some new jeans,’ said Airey.

‘I’m gonna buy Dibbie’s copy of Steamy Kitchen Lust,’ I said.

We took the bottles into the shop and the old woman looked at them.

‘Where’d y’gettem?’

‘Mill Pond,’ said Foyi.

She looked at them. Jiggled the marbles inside.

‘They’re worth nowt.’

‘Course they are,’ said Airey. ‘I’ve seen some like this for a coupla quid each.’

‘Not these, though.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Foyi, who knew she was lying. ‘See ya then.’

‘Od up, where are you tekkin’ ’em?’

‘Taking them back.’

‘You can leave them here if you want.’

‘Er, I don’t think so.’

You can probably guess what we did with the bottles. Every last one of them.

And that’s why I don’t really like the word serendipity. Because it never lasts.