Shaun, a fifty-something corporate executive, is at a meeting with colleagues and customers. He is going through a midlife crisis, is disinterested and burnt out at work and finding life stressful and unfullfilling. Afterwards, he visist his father's grave. While laying flowers, he digs out a pair of cowboy boots from the grave. He recognises them as a pair his father brought him from London when he was a teenager, but never wore. He walks to a bench across from the grave and sits down to reflect. The cowboy boots follow him across and "sit" beside him on the bench. He gets up and hurries away down the path towards the gate to the graveyard, but the boots follow him. He turns around to confront them and encourages a passing dog to chase the boots away. When this fails, he throws the boots into nearby bushes and proceeds towards the gate. The boots, however, are waiting for him at the gate, now playing a guitar. Shaun is last seen discarding his corporate-style clothes, putting on the cowboy boots and striding down the road with the guitar slung over his shoulder.

A 12-year old boy, Michael, has a life-enhancing experience  at the end of summer and national school, scoring the winning goal and winning a trophy in his hometown with his Under-12 teammates.Soon after he is sent off to boarding school where he is homesick, unhappy under a brutal corporal punishment regime. The boarding school is situated in a remote mountainous area on the shores of a lake, in which  two boys, also boarding at the school, are reputed to have drowned 150 years earlier while being pursued.  Michael experiences  similar danger, but escapes from the school, with encouragement from the "ghost boys" in the lake.