Being the uneventful and rather plain story of the childhood and youth of one Jethro Anson Nowsty, an ordinary boy from an ordinary working class family in an ordinary town in Darlington, north east England, from his first tentative steps into the adult world of work in the summer of 1979, aged 15, then backwards in time, via his youth, education and family, recalling the many lively characters that informed his personality, to his earliest memories in 1967 and all told through short stories over twenty-nine chapters.