When Richard Greensmith, happily married senior lecturer at Foxton University, agrees to go away on a short boys' trip to Edinburgh with his philandering friend Nicholas, he has little idea of the radical changes that are about to take place in his life. Set in the early eighties, 'While Herding Cats' is a campus novel, a buddy story and a tale of love and infidelity, set against a bacgdrop of ambition, corruption and blackmail in a provincial university.