Movin' on up (Ed and Emmur), Movin' on out (Brian and Jenny), Time to break free (Lily from Russ, we hope), Nothing can stop *The Archers* in 2019 - Thread 97 (Joe Grundy’s age!)

[Bittermints]

Many thanks to @LilianGish for the title and to @NotdeadyetBOING for being the last threadstarter. Further thanks due to @PseudoBadger for kicking of this long, long series of Archers threads and to @DadDadDad for being our resident statistician and keeping the ball rolling when Pseudo stepped back a bit.

All views on The Archers welcome here! New blood welcomed.

Spoilers: not on this thread, please. We don't wait for the omnibus to discuss the weeknight episodes, but we do try our best to avoid cross-contamination from www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/3439443-keep-it-to-yourself-the-archers-spoilers-thread-4, where spoilers are positively welcomed!

I wonder where Brian and Jennifer will end up. I was very taken with the idea on the last thread that the mysterious Gills won't last very long and the house will be sold back to the Aldridges at a knockdown price.

SaturdayNight, I think one of my early purchases was a Seekers LP too. My interests were fairly untrendy. Still are TBH. Somewhere i have a notebook where i listed all my outgoings for a few months, I think early 70s. IIRC it was mostly sweets and comics. I also thing for stationery goods. One of my early solo Saturday outings was a mooch round Woolies for the notebooks and pick n mix.

Didn’t we recently have the twins’ 60th birthday?

We did, @JessieMcJessie

Echt, i Hope there were gum trees as in Kookaburra sings in the old gum tree. Memories of Brownies in the 60s!

Back to TA - why would Shula have so much free time? All she‘s done is she’d a husband but she still runs a business. I suppose she doesn’t have company in the evenings and might save time if she isn’t doing a meal every night, but really? Also, now she’s rid of A, why isn’t she planning to go away as she wanted to do before?

Just checking in. 750 posts in just over a fortnight!

Anybody else want to be on standby for the next thread? I'm happy to do it again otherwise. Title suggestions might be a good idea now ...

Some of you will also remember maths lessons in the run up to decimalisation. I remember it like learning a new language and the books were brand new whereas the £sd books were old and grubby. Of course the counting was easier with decimal. We‘d do £sd sums first thing, then decimal sums after the morning interval.

The Scaffold play their part in preparing us for the great change. I was just young enough to escape the £sd era in arithmetic altogether. I could manage change perfectly well, though.

I am under 50 and remember using shillings for 10p and half shillings for 5p.

Unlikely, TBH. 10p equated to two shillings, 5p to one. Half a shilling=6d=2.5p.

I must say, I really wasn't sorry to give up maths in pounds, shillings and pence, but the old system did do wonders for my knowledge of the 12 times table.

Whoops you're right @SaturdayNext. It was 2 shilling coins for 10p and 1 shilling for 5p of course.

My dad stubbornly referred to "bob" for years after decimalisation. Used to drive my mum mad!

I'm exactly of the era to have been at school during decimalisation and then metrication. Thankfully by the time I reached sixth form the sciences and maths were fully S.I. - my older brothers had had to deal with them in imperial and then CGS units, poor sods.

My mother was a primary school teacher and was about the only adult I knew when I was growing up who quoted measurements in cm not inches out of school. I still use both... my favourite muffin recipe cheerfully mixes cups, ounces and millilitres. (but for work the standard unit of length is the Ångstrom)

I am old enough- or maybe contrary enough - to occasionally think “Fuck me, 10 bob for a Mars Bar!”

The kids of today (i.e. anybody under 50!) have only known QEII coins.

Some of us under 50 had old coins for our "toy" money. I've got a 10s note somewhere, too.

As Auntie’s Grandpa said after a lunch up in town

“It’s outrageous, 13/6 for a bowl of minestrone !”

At the time I thought 65p was OK for a bowl of sit down soup & attributed his indignation as an aversion to inflation. But then many folk at the time thought stealth inflation had crept in under the dark cloak of decimalisation. Rapidly followed by the oil crisis, IMF & entry to the EEC, I was taking my pocket money out in a wheel barrow.

A bowl of soup in a restaurant is £6.50ish . That’s ten times what my Grandfather paid in my life time. Outrageous!

Some of you will also remember maths lessons in the run up to decimalisation. What I've always found strange is they made such a meal of teaching binary, presented it as something really bizarre, and so of course the maths-timid set up mental barriers and never got to grips with it - whereas it's just couning to base 2, and we all of us were already adept at counting to base 4, 7, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20 and 60.

Like they say, there's 10 types of people: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Some of you will also remember maths lessons in the run up to decimalisation.
I was so grateful to decimalisation as I did my Maths O Level in 1971 so for the two years before that we had to work in decimal. Prior to that we had to work out compound interest etc. in £Sd which I found impossible.

I can work in metric or Imperial measures more or less equally but if I'm making something I learnt to do prior to metrication, like a Victoria sponge, I can only think it in ounces. Also weighing myself has to be in Stones and Pounds not kilos.

All I remember of decimalisation lessons at school was about a year of Bingo!

And I'm incapable of perceiving myself in kilos ...

Oh I'd forgotten how old money had a Smell. Nostalgia - it just ain't like it used to be though.

I like your thinking ADarkandStormy.

Could someone more talented than me (i.e. anyone) share an example of what an Ed Grundy as life model sketch might look like? Pencil or charcoal - your choice.

And on the subject of threepenny bits, I am so old that I got 2 of these for my pocket money when I was 6 or 7, and always bought a pack of crayons and a little plain paper book with a picture of a doll in national costume from Woolworths. Sixpence for the 2!

Judging by the turn this thread has taken the new title should be something along the lines of If you don’t give a ha’porthfor Pip come and add your two penn’orth here - we do enjoy a bit of change counting (especially if it’s in old money)

Alice is a spoilt brat
she should never have presumed like that

Can someone please remind me whether it’s Iain or Adam who’s father to The Baby?

Roy ... probably. But officially Adam. (As pp have suggested, this will make future Home Farm inheritance issues delightfully fraught.)

What is Brian thinking of?