Ivan Moss sets aside his heartless streak and his weakness for the Merlot to give time to his ailing mother and her final hospital appointments.
But if he hoped for a fund of fond memories from his mother, then she is reluctant to oblige. Her account of a wild marriage and divorce with his father, an ex-merchant sailor grocer, 'the Joseph Conrad of Spam', brings Ivan to confront his own tough childhood in Govan and an even worse adolescence in an outlying estate.
Mother and son hilariously continue their bitter-sweet tussles to come as painfully close as they are capable of being in this funniest of Glasgow love stories.