Eddie is a privileged, drugged-up, dole cheat; Alex is a lazy, cynical lad-magazine hack bored with writing articles on why men like burping; Tony has a wife he suspects of sleeping with the entire world except himself. Fifteen years ago they were just three undergraduates sharing hallucinogenic drugs in the lyrical beauty of the English countryside; now they are three semi-professionals sharing worries about love, death, politics, sport, money, children, art, religion, race and schoolgirls.
In the background, yet everywhere around, is England, their England: lovely, unspoilt, tender, poignantly rural. This is the dream that gives their lives meaning, and yet manacles them to the past. Which one of them will survive, find God, get married? Which gets the girl? As they fight themselves, each other, the world, they discover that what it takes to be a modern Englishman is more complicated and profound than they ever imagined.
