Tommy took off his trousers and shirt and climbed into his bed. 'Water under the bridge, ' he said, pulling up the covers. 'Aqua under the bleedin' flyover'. From skulduggery in Soho to heartbreak in the Home Counties, from spivvy dealings in Oxford Street to a chilling series of encounters with Old Nick ...an extraordinary cast of characters struggles for survival against the mundane, the disconcerting and the downright weird. This mixture of published and unpublished work by prize-winning author Ron White covers half a century of output by a writer of enormous range and downbeat humour, with a rare gift for exploring the oddness of human frailty at play in the everyday. Alongside the short stories are essays that have previously appeared in the Observer, the Listener and History Today, adding historical and social perspective to an original, singular and never less than entertaining take on the vagaries of the human condition