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Poppy has time for everybody, and whoever she meets falls in love with her.
Set in contemporary London, the film focuses on the character of Pauline Cross, who has the nickname "Poppy". Poppy is an irrepressibly cheerful, Pollyanna-type primary school teacher, thirty years old, single, and infinitely optimistic and accepting. A free spirit, she is open and generous – as funny and anarchic as she is focused and responsible.
She loves the children she teaches, and works hard. She shares a flat with a girlfriend, enjoys her social life, is caring towards her younger sisters, and takes flamenco and trampoline lessons.
When she starts driving lessons, her maturity and her sense of humor help her to deal with a manic instructor.
Comfortable with being single, she meets a guy through work with whom she really clicks.
The film begins with Poppy's bike ride and visit to a bookstore, where she unsuccessfully tries to chat up the bookstore employee. When she returns to where she left her bicycle, the bike is missing. Zoe, Poppy and one of her sisters who is reading sociology at university then go out clubbing one evening.
Instead of replacing the bike, Poppy decides to take driving lessons for the first time in her life. Her driving instructor, Scott, is emotionally repressed, with anger problems and given to conspiracy theories, racism and misogyny. Her optimistic personality grates on Scott initially, but as the lessons progress, he develops an attraction towards her, which she does not return.
One scene shows Poppy teaching her students to make bird masks. With another teacher, Poppy tries flamenco lessons for the first time. Her other leisure-time activities include a trampoline class, which leads to back problems and a physiotherapy session.
It’s a study in sadness versus happiness, a study in teachers and the taught, a study in how we carry with us the burdens of what we have and haven’t learned every day. You know you’re watching something both delightfully light-footed and acutely meaningful when Leigh moves so nimbly between scenes at Poppy’s school, her flamenco class and her driving lessons. There’s also a wonderfully moving scene, darker and more poetic in tone, when Poppy encounters a tramp late at night.