We first encounter Clive, an embittered middle aged making his way home from London following a tedious corporate conference. A security incident on the underground frustrates his homeward journey and, recognising there is scant hope of catching his intended train, he heads for a local public house. Here he encounters an attractive woman, someone from his distant past, for whom his unrequited love, has left him emotionally scarred for life.  This chance meeting resurrects long discarded memories of seminal events all of which took place some thirty-five years before. As he finally boards the train for the long journey home, he recollects those various individuals and incidents which did so much to shape his later life.

We next meet Clive in his early twenties pursuing an unsatisfactory career in domestic banking. Following a strange, disjointed weekend with an old school friend Nick, he becomes hopelessly intrigued by Nick’s stunningly attractive partner Anna, a woman he has only fleetingly seen and not yet met.

Set against the backdrop of the turbulent late seventies and the early years of Thatcherism, Clive and Nick’s initial meeting takes place during the death throes of the Callaghan Government, during the so-called ‘winter of discontent’. After Thatcher’s victory, Clive finally meets Anna and from this point onwards, we see how Clive’s fixation becomes an unhealthy, all-consuming obsession, one from which he never quite escapes and which sadly, disastrously impacts on all aspects of his life, particularly his relationship with women for decades afterwards.

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