Accidentals celebrates occasions and instances seen in the perspective of a whole lifetime, bringing together a disparate range of subjects - among them, capsizing a small boat in a North Sea gale; two visits to Petra, thirty-eight years apart; the paintings of Samuel Palmer; lighthouses; favourite films; seahorses; Voltaire's Candide. Enriched by Erica Sail's drawings and some of the author's poems, the book still keeps at its centre a single life lived - one where, as Lawrence Sail writes, 'the role of the accidental, in more than one sense of the word, has been much more prominent than I had realised [...] A life in which the contingent plays such a part may come closer to farce more often than its leaseholder would like to admit, but at least the admission may ward off hubris'. -- Lawrence Sail