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.

I don't think Lexi is stupid enough for it to be Roy, and as far as we can tell they are unlikely to have had sex in the last few weeks.

I'm quite looking forward to Alice's breakdown.

I am under 50 and remember using (two) shillings for 10p and half shillings for 5p
I'm under 40 and so do I!

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

I had the same reaction to the price of a cream egg earlier, but 68 pence doesn't have the same ring to it.

I used to enjoy explaining old money to my international colleagues by showing them the instructions given to American servicemen after that war:

British money is in pounds, shillings, and pence. The British are used to this system and they like it, and all your arguments that the American decimal system is better won't convince them.

A unit of money, not shown in the following table, which you will sometimes see advertised in the better stores is the guinea (pronounced "ginny" with the "g" hard as in "go"). It is worth 21 shillings, or one pound plus one shilling. There is no actual coin or bill of this value in use. It is merely a quotation of price.

A coin not shown in the table below is the gold sovereign, with a value of one pound. You will read about it in English literature but you will probably never see one and need not bother about it.

(You can read the whole thing on here, it's amusing, as is the one about Germans given to the British www.hardscrabblefarm.com/ww2/britain.htm)

Brian might not be wrong about it being a reasonable gamble.

Adam. Chris Carter might be a candidate for the life class drawing. Not Joe Grundy please.

I love Imperial measures.

16 ounces (ozs) to a pound, 14 pounds (lbs) to a stone,8 stone to a underweight (cwt) and 20 cwt to a ton.

12 inches to a foot , 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile.

8 pints to a gallon.

Bonkers.

Hurrah for Brian fighting back. There's life in the old dog yet! And he backed up Adam.

I never notice which SW wrote 'tonight's' episode - but I would like to know who was having such fun casting Chris as a Neanderthal during Alice's argument with Adam.

"I'm not bein' funny but you're standin' in my 'ouse" was particularly hilarious, given that Chris lives in a house gifted to his wife by her parents.

IMperial measures ... but they've all got a basis in a useful physical measurement, and there are a lot of intermediates that we don't use so much now which help to make sense. A hundredweight is 112lbs, used to be 100lbs before some people headed off to America (US cwt is 100lbs), at which point those remaining decided they preferred to have stones as their main weight, and 112lbs is the nearest whole no. of stones above 100lbs.

Lengths are largely based on chains - I chain =22 yds, a furlong is 10 chains, a mile is 8 furlongs. A rod, pole or perch was 1/4 chain. That all makes sense -it's just that we no longer use rod, chains, furlongs, so a mile looks totally irrational.

I found out recently that a scruple is a measure of weight - it's 20 grains.

Has Chris always been such a yokel? His performance reminded me of Heatherpet’s latterday professional northerner accent (which didn’t stop her going out on a cockney ditty). I would actually have preferred it if he hadn’t been in that scene and Alice could have phoned him in tears afterwards (consigned to the horse shoe cupboard or whatever cupboard it is that blacksmiths have in their workshop).

Did anyone else have exercise books with all the imperial weights and measures and the times tables printed on the back cover?

Thank you, MDoP, that led to googling which led to an enjoyable perusal of this page of measures: home.clara.net/brianp/quickref.html

I love it when you find obscure websites created by enthusiasts. Somehow I stumbled across one recently about the history of area dialling codes and post codes. Fascinating. I had always wondered why post code areas aren't numbered in a more geographically consecutive way; turns out it's because they are numbered alphabetically, after the name of the area. Same with area dialling codes.

witch - thanks, nice link! I'd forgotten all about poundals, which we did in Applied Mathematics at school - never did really understand them.

And yes, grandmother I remember those exercise books!

Because I suspect I'm not the only one, here's the site: rhaworth.net/phreak/tenp_01.php

Bittermints I won't offer as I'm about to be away for a couple of weeks, but I think LilG has a good title suggestion

witchmountain you should take a listen to the Boring Talks podcast (which, if you look upthread, was part of how I brought up the whole pre-decimalisation topic), it's all about enthusiasts presenting their niche interest.

I remember going out with a friend as a child and her grandad offered to buy us each an ice cream. They were £1 each and he exclaimed, 'A pound! In my day you could get a pig for a pound!'

In other news, Alice, Chris, and Jenny were all awful tonight. Alice for going completely ott in her reaction, after having had a modicum of self-realisation that it was her fault, launching into the extreme attention seeking was annoying. Jenny with her 'poor Alice' routine which just reinforces the problem. And Chris, who actually tried to talk her out of admitting her mistake and instead blamed it all on Adam, was the absolute worst of the three. He should definitely get back to the forge and not darken our airways.

We have some excellent 'great courses' lectures on various aspects of engineering, presented by an American professor (who also happens to be a General in their army) ... DD was astounded by his use of foot-pounds instead of joules.

Alice annoys me more than Pip.

Yes, I remember those exercise books, glamorous! Also Kennedy's Shorter Latin Primer, invariably vandalised into the Shortbread Eating Primer.

Wasn't one of the things that set Roy off worrying about Lexi after she came back that they hadn't - ahem - done the do, as it were? So I don't think it's his baby.

What I saw in this last ep was Alice being concerned about the look of it all, how she'd look foolish after the radio broadcast she hadn't checked out. Then Brine's ambition to shut up others, no word that he hadn't done what he's done, only that he could win and keep his rep.

Apple. Tree.

Also Kennedy's Shorter Latin Primer, There was a very good programme on this on Radio 4 about a week ago. Written by two women (though keeping father's name on it in order that it was taken seriously). Mary Beard "accompanied by a Chorus of Women and a Chorus of Trolls". Amo Amas Amusical
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001tb2

Has Chris always been such a yokel?

I wondered that too. And has Alice always been such a hooray Henrietta/Sloane?

Yes Marguerita To both the questions! They're both a bit lacking in common sense too.

I liked the exchange with Alice? About Adam voting leave and the reason why he's giving up on the strawberries.

To my ears the three Aldridge daughters are wonderfully rendered - in most of the writing and all the acting*. They sound like sisters, they sound like their parents' children, they sound like products of their wider social circle (which we never hear from).

But I'm a bit regarding the continued TASWAMA downgrading of poor Alice. Why the hell should all her rofessional successes be related to Home Farm? Why should she be shaking with grief and mortification over this setback? And why, after years of working, should she be so very scared of her boss?

It's all so depressing. She really should have taken the job in Canada ...

*I don't believe she would have omitted to consult Adam.

But I'm a bit  regarding the continued TASWAMA downgrading of poor Alice.

Heck yes.
Well, I just hope that Chris's pep talk works, she shakes herself down, contacts some big strawberry growers and the project goes ahead and it's then clear to her employers that she's not reliant on her family's farm for agribusinesses contacts. And also come to her senses about her alcohol usage. I rather fear they'll have her making contact with a grower, meeting for lunch, drinking and then blowing it horribly,

Yes-Alice not consulting Adam was seriously unrealistic. But Adam not telling Brian that he was giving up the strawberries was unrealistic too. Why can’t anyone in TA just be good at their job?