The protagonist is a pregnant, confused, 27-year-old, who goes on an emotional and physical adventure that's just as exciting as taking a camel to Timbuktu, but it all happens in the backstreets of Fulham. She starts out as a prejudiced and narrow suburban girl who doesn't realise how much she's engaged in fighting with Daddy, and she finds her feet and becomes someone else... She learns she's not so great and that those people she feels superior to are the best people to know when you're in a mess. It's an every day miracle, like a bulb coming up and producing a tulip, studied carefully. It's a book to save a life. I shall press it upon my daughter.
...and I went and waited in the hall [of the hospital] , which was ablaze with the Matisse colours of Christmas decorations. Two enormous red paper bells hung from the centre of the ceiling, and from these radiated countless paper-chain ellipses dripping with silver icicles. It was all overdone, like the decorations in the ward, but even while I was having a superior little mental scoff, they were making me feel obscurely uneasy and near to tears....Why, of all times of the year, did it have to be Christmas? It wasn't just a thing you could ignore, and being alone at it was to combine the worst elements of being alone at any other time...London fogs; writers used to get a lot of mileage out of these: they don't happen any more.
the fog seemed to close in and the bus was forced to nose its way cautiously along in first gear. The journey went on and on - before long we were travelling at a walking pace, and I and the few other passengers were anxiously clearing the condensation from the windows and peering into the murk in an effort to see where we were. Passing a street-light came to seem quite an event; one watched their brave little sulphurous smudges receding with a feeling akin to despair, as if we might never find another.
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