It’s 24 December, 1999. Byron Easy, a poverty-stricken poet – half-cut and suicidal – sits on a stationary train at King’s Cross waiting to depart. In his lap is a bag containing his remaining worldly goods: an empty bottle of red wine, a few books, a handful of crumpled banknotes. He is on the run. Not from the usual writer's trouble – money trouble, soul trouble – but special trouble, of a type you may have problems identifying with at first.

As the journey commences, he conjures memories (painful and comic alike) of the recent past, of his roller-coaster London life, and of Mandy – his Amazonian wife – in an attempt to make sense of his terrible, and ordinary, predicament.