Today like every day roughly 5,000 people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses.

Up the narrow stairs and into the kitchen. Rosie’s mother looked around and made a face as if to indicate that it did not meet her standards of hygiene, containing as it did, edible foodstuffs....

Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds.