Brenda Watt's life has no purpose. She is sixty-five and has retired from a full-time job after working in the same offices for forty-two tedious and unhappy years. She has no family, no one she could call a close friend and has never had the time or inclination for hobbies, clubs or gyms. She feels lonely, isolated and useless. So she decides she needs a challenge and decides to volunteer at a local charity shop. This is the starting point for her transformed world. She discovers that charity shops are not the quiet, unassuming places she had always imagined them to be, as she experiences school girl thieves, grooms who have lost their wedding outfits, drug runners, ferrets, floods and discarded goldfish. Brenda had never imagined how much she could enjoy life.