Young lecturer Tristram has a problem—if only he could remember what it was and how he got himself entangled in it. A laugh-out-loud book of misadventures, misunderstandings, muddles, mix-ups, and spoonerisms. Could Tristram's problem be his abject failure in the dating game due to his inability to keep his girlfriends' names straight? Maybe his tangles with the law, inadvertently mugging a jogger and mistakenly being arrested for bank-robbery? Or perhaps, the huge, hulking fury of a man who clearly thinks that Tristram has insulted him in some mysterious way? What is abundantly clear is the cause of all these woes—debilitating and chronic absentmindedness that, try as he might, Tristram just cannot overcome. As his hilarious predicaments become ever more disastrous, Tristram finds solace in compiling his own book, a record of the absentminded excesses of historical figures: among them Einstein, Edison, Beethoven, and the Rev W. A. Spooner, father of the Spoonerism, who on one occasion proposed a loyal toast to "the queer old dean," Queen Victoria. Anybody who has politely thanked a machine for issuing a ticket, asked directions from a mannequin in a department store, wheeled off someone else's cart in a supermarket, or simply mislaid keys, glasses, hats, or scarves will appreciate the many misadventures of Tristram Throstlethwaite.