These ten stories are all to an extent concerned with consolation and reflection. Since they relate to the distant view of life that age confers many begin with accounts of early youth and adolescence since the impressions of those years are often the brightest and most enduring.Miss Siddons describes how an elderly English lady returns to the Surrey hills upon the death of her twin sister after a life in the Kenyan highlands restoring hope and home. The Bottom Line is a humorous account of Mr Warmbutt's life in Clitheroe in the late 1950s. It moves from a hilarious victory over a bully at the Royal Grammar School. K 80 concerns the consolation for the loss of wife and child through cystic fibrosis.Berries relates how a cleaner is drawn by circumstance and duty into the vortex of a man's decline into death with terminal cancer.Nuts and May tells of the onset of clinical depression of a distinguished former Oxford undergraduate and his gradual return to health, illuminating it with life affirming experiences. What's the Point is a tale of how a vigorous and successful entrepreneur, by a series of humorous events and chances since schooldays. Pupa concerns the misconceptions of a novice reporter on a Bournemouth newspaper as to the events leading up to the eviction of an elderly and impoverished tenant.The Birthday Treat relates the experiences of two men who as 18 year olds in their last year at a boarding school formed an unlikely friendship.Bleister's Bubble describes the doings of a very able and grossly rich solicitor who is defined by a colossal ego which he maintains around him as a vast invisible bubble.
Forty Years On is woven around an account of a cricket match between the sons and grandsons of a school eleven and the Clympe Down cricket club.
