After a life-time's teaching Classics to the Upper-Sixth, at a very minor Boy's Public School in Oxfordshire, the last of the 'DWEMs', as he likes to describe himself, believes that he is fighting a rear-guard action, defending and guarding a diminishing mythopoetic world view on which his own personal values, and those of Western Civilisation are built. And which are being cruelly tested, to breaking-point when he is called to 'support' one of his own 'favourite' ex-students who has been arrested for 'Terrorist Activities'. It is this, above all else which becomes the Circumstances of Departure; his own and of others, in one way or another.

(DWEM was coined by Bernard Knox, to describe Classicists as a species: Dead White European Males.)