My mother, ninety-three, 
blames me and my kind
for mollycoddling the feckless.

Alistair Findlay has written the first ever memoir of a career in Scottish social work. He reflects on the changing landscape of the profession since he entered it in 1970 in a memoir that is thoughtful, progressive, humane – and funny. He conveys how he and his fellow workers shared friendship and banter in work that can be hard and thankless but also hugely rewarding and worthwhile. 

Everyone knows what a teacher or a doctor does because everyone has met one. Very few people meet social workers. Your chances of meeting a social worker increase the poorer you are; the more jobless; the more deprived the area you reside in... Frontline social workers can flit in the blink of an eye from the ordered calm of a courtroom to absurdist Beckett-like dialogues with psychotic individuals to struggles with distraught mothers – one wielding a claw-hammer on a tenement landing, as happened to me.