Mrs Mariner is getting bored. The old man comes home after a hard day pestering people with his lurid seafaring yarns, and all he wants is his tea and the paper. Meanwhile, in another place and time, Laura Sparrow is fed up with her husband's obsession with Coleridge's poem and his philandering with female students. As characters from these narratives start to invade each others' lives, the question is, who is writing the script?