It's August and Fun Week for the kids in Bethnel Green, where forty-one-year-old Dexter Bucknell, sometime publisher turned freelance copy editor, is hoping to inveigle his live-in lover, Moy, into marrying him and being a mother to his two young sons. While Moy escapes daily to her Mile End studio, Dexter is left at home to juggle work and debts and domestic chores. Further complicating their lives are Dexter's furiously letter-writing ex-wife, his mother, Moy's schizophrenic brother, and the unavoidable decision Dexter has to confront about his future.