Tom is a young man with AIDS living in London with his lover Ira. The disease has exaggerated Toms nervous energy and in his manic state he suddenly decides to go to Glasgow to visit the family he hasn't seen in ten years. His brother Ian is thoroughly disgusted by his lifestyle and only his mother shows any compassion for him. The visit soon develops into a nightmare as dementia sets in and Tom's health rapidly declines. Finally, events come to a head and Ira has no choice but to force Tom back to London, where he expects him to die at any time. After treatment, Tom gets a brief reprieve, having discovered that his real family is his adopted one in London.
Led by Kim Philby, Plan Aurora is a plan that breaches the top-secret Fourth Protocol and turns the fears that shaped it into a living nightmare. A crack Soviet agent, placed under cover in a quiet English country town, begins to assemble a nuclear bomb, whilst an MI5 agent attempts to prevent its detonation.
"It never done a woman any harm to be at the end o' a back-hander." In a society where drunkenness and battered wives are treated as 'normal', Jean McLeod attempts to hold her family together. But after a particularly severe beating she decides to fight back.
When Dexter Munro and his new wife Juliet get married, they decide to escape Juliet's meddling father by buying a rundown cottage and doing it up themselves. But when the cottage proves to be more ramshackle than they thought, and the scale of the repairs needed far out of their budget, the newlyweds are forced into calling on Juliet's father after all. Before long he's employed incompetent builder Josh Wicks, and the situation goes from bad to worse.