Tis the season to be jolly, Fallon, Alan, Helen, Lillian; Deck the Hall with boughs of Holly, Lily, Will and Jill, Tilly Button. Celebrate Christmas with The Archers!

[PseudoBadger]

Thanks to SmallLegsOrSmallEggs for this thread title way back in November!

Pear Ruth wants to sell the herd and buy new cows. No big revelations (just yet). They're about to get out some spreadsheets by the sound of it. Now they're mushy over a cow.

Damn.

I rearranged my day to fit in listening to this

"We're in it together" ? Bleurgh

Yay!! I read the runes without melting lead. Yesterday I said "I can't see why Rooth announcing she wants a divorce would be "different from any other soap anniversary". I think she will have come back with a masterplan to revive the business that will coincidentally involve hiring an expert young contract milker and a first class graduate in farming (Matthew and Pip) She doesn't know about Berrow Farm but it's demise will be part of the solution. She will tell David she is back on track and wants to solve their problems and he will coo and bill and it will all be lovely. Can't see how that will be "unlike any other show's anniversary episode ever" unless we get the ghosts of Dan and Doris and Phil coming back to haunt us with farming and life advice for the family??"

Written by graham Harvey? How often does that happen o aficionados?

Oh what a let down

She ain't leavin' awwww nawww

ok, where is dairyfarmerswife and other knowledgeable types to tell us how feasible it all is?

Poor Deevid, he was so pathetically grateful that fRoof hasn't run off with a kiwi. He never quite recovered from the Sam shenanigans, did he?

Well done Top.

Confess to feeling rather cheated that nothing more dramatic happened.

Can I ask a newbie question? Why don't listeners like Ruth? Is it because she left?

Bit of a letdown really but I couldn't have coped with any more melodrama and it's reassuring that Jill deals with a potential emotional crisis by serving coffee and fruit cake.

Oh, well done TopOf

cosmic She doesn't have an empathetic bone in her body. It's all about her. And she moans constantly, about nothing.

Cosmic it is because she moans and moans and moans! But maybe she has got her mojo back now and will be SuperCowWoman again

Thank you! I've got to grips with some storylines, but I couldn't find out what she had done.

Deeply, deeply disappointed. I was so hoping she would say she was moving out.

However (looking on the bright side) - the molten lead now seems quite prophetic.

Broken cow - the herd is going to be broken up.
Ferret - good luck for Grundys.
Moon - the herd will be gone by the next full moon.
Speared fish - signifying 'silence is her salvation' - now that Ruth has set out her masterplan for the herd she will be too busy to speak on air again. That was the last time we will ever hear her.
Triangles - signifying insecurity and loss of secured existence, slightly misogynist - it's all going to go tits up at Brookfield and Ruth will slink off in the night.

Don't see how any of that can possibly be challenged. The lead has spoken.

Topof - brilliant, I missed that! I liked that epi, despite hating fruit cake! "Shall I tell you something, Deeavud Archer?" - so it's not just Joe Grundy!

Hello all! Well.... Have speed read the comments as I was doing bedtime and listening at the same time! I spent the whole time wondering why on earth SOC was trying to get us so hyped up about it. But...

Roooth is right. At least, everything she said was correct. We have very little control over the price we are paid for our milk but we can control the cost of producing it. I'm sure I've said before that low input systems rely on a bigger profit margin whereas the high input systems (berrow etc) are aiming for a big volume of milk at low margin. As the margin gets squeezed they feel the pain first.

Her technical points were all right too. Even selling the cows they have to buy in the right type of cow. The cows they have are worth as much, if not more than the type of cow they want to buy. We wish we had switched wholesale like that, rather than making the wrong type of cow fit the new system.

The one thing which confuses me is that I thought they were already following Nz principles with the autumn calving herd, for example they had just put in cow tracks to extend the grazing. The other thing is Ruth's confidence that they will get a better milk contract.... New contracts just aren't out there at the moment. (And they can't just get the berrow contract, it doesn't work like that.)

I liked that episode. The antithesis of EE.
I do find Ruth annoying but I don't get all the hate for her.
When David went out to the cows after R's announcement I thought we were going to have another "talking to Phil via the medium of cows" - Glad we didn't :)

She does make sense and DFW makes it clearer. It is good to hear a woman in TA taking the initiative and using her expertise.

I'm not sure Ruth moans that much more than other Archers characters - she just has a really moany voice so it makes it worse. I mean imagine if Lynda Snell or Susan Carter or Eddie Grundy had that voice - we'd hate them for moaning too, and in fact they moan all the time but it's just not as annoying.

Actually though she's not a character I really hate. I really hate Shula, Tony and Tom. Arrrgggghhh! Obviously I hate Rob and Helen has always been bloody irritating, but at least that's supposed to be a "love to hate" storyline.

It occurred to me years ago that there's hardly anyone really likeable in the Archers. But I like Usha and Ian.

I liked the farming stuff. The relationship stuff I thought was a massive massive cop out!

I missed the first 5 mins. Wandered into the kitchen where it was on the radio. Heard fRuth whining on about cows. Wandered out again thinking oh ffs, I'll just read the thread!

I really liked that episode, Ruth made sense!

Much of farming is all about the inputs, it's the only thing you can control. Who was it said that farming was the only industry that bought retail, sold wholesale and paid the haulage both ways (or words to that effect)?

I was listening to a soap script writer on R4 the other day and he was saying that the characters had to be unhappy to make a story line, happy people were boring. Well, I want to listen to an everyday story of country folk (with advice on farming - and tax, benefits pensions etc. - thrown in), so boring works pretty well for me, at least it gives my credibility suspenders a rest!

I don't want doom and gloom but I'm getting fed up of waiting for the Knob and Hellin storyline to reach a climax. Something tells me we've got a long wait.