The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.

The confrontation of urban and rural lifestyles is the major source of fun in the novel which would be incomplete without due references to the WI where tradition decreed that one should wear a tweedy A-line skirt with a delicious lemony-coloured twin set (119), where one can get one's hand on loads of those hand-knitted gnome families they always make (118) and where new members are introduced into the mysteries of how to knit Mrs Santa Claus or the Three Bears in lime green wool remnants (118).

That interest has exceeded its original bounds as a hobby; now, Dr. Barrett is a "quackbuster” full-time.

Organisations that have noticed an increase in presenteeism are nearly twice as likely to report an increase in stress-related absence and more than twice as likely to report an increase in mental health problems among their staff too.