One of the great traditions of the Northern Englishman is bemoaning his lot of being born in the North, while not wishing to have been born anywhere else and not leaving.

Billy Fisher lives in a late 50s Yorkshire town, one of many. He works for a clerk at the undertaker, juggles three girlfriends and dreams of being a comedy writer in London. He is of the aspirational lower middle class, educated and clever enough to see the horizons of life in the provinces, but maybe not enough to break through them. He's also torn between his scorn for both the false-nostalgia of the Yorkshireman for his dreamy Yorkshire past on the moors, a nd the reality of the crap concrete-plastic-glass modernity paving it over. Billy therefore creates a parallel fantasy world, separating fantasy versions of his life and relationships into type 1 thinking and the subconscious-dread-creeping-to-the-top of reality into type 2 thinking. Through the book, the former initially dominates, starting as a comedy, while the latter catches up, bringing a very different feeling towards the end.