At the age of 86, Tom Cotton declares that, after forty years, he has retired from his hobby of translating modern English literature into Latin. In the twenty years since retiring from his chosen profession as an industrial chemist he has also published on various subjects, including a narrative history of "Rome : City-state to Empire" and a memoir of his National Service in the Royal Artillery, "That Man There!". Here, he offers a wide range of pieces, written in the last ten years, which includes short fiction, personal anecdotes, opinions and factual essays; he concludes with an appreciation of some lost aspects of English village life in a series of poems about people and places.