Unhappy-Go-Lucky

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. Tough as him when it comes to expressing emotion, she'sjust as hopeless when faced with a charming hospital consultant. 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' and a big reader of Dostoevsky, 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 driest and funniest of Glasgow love stories.