Discuss The Archers #108: Has Ed & Emma’s ship sailed? Will Alice stick her oar into Kate's love life? Can Shula walk on water? Come and discuss whatever floats your boat in The Archers.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Thank you, @PseudoBadger, for kicking off this long, long series of Archers threads and @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. We don't all agree on all points and most of us are posting tongue in cheek a lot of the time, so don't worry about revealing that you'd like to be Susan's best friend or other unusual views.

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!

For newer listeners, lurkers or those who just have no idea what we're talking about, DadDadDad has created this useful thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/3557323-For-Archers-fans-a-guide-to-acronyms-on-the-long-running-discussion-threads-and-any-other-meta-thread-questions-you-may-have BOOP point for him! (See thread for explanation.)

Thanks to @QuaterMiss for the title of this thread. For reasons of space had to cut out the bit speculating about Oliver and Tracy pairing off. Surely not!

Off now to give blood, something nobody in Ambridge ever does. See you all later.

Thanks everyone for the explanation about the pony/horse difference.

It feels as if even Oliver has given up on him - he arranged to shortlist Tracey and Freddie (who hadn't applied) but not Ed (who had).

I think Oliver would have interviewed him if Lynda and Roy hadn't already sent the rejection letters. (Uncharacteristically communicative for modern recruitment practices...)

It may not have been deliberate but Tracey's 'game' of making Emma list all Ed's faults made her realise how much she does love him after all so maybe it did some good. Time will tell.

So ... I can give you the gist of what happened next - but I cannot claim to understand the details. I may not be the only one in this predicament. The SWs have excelled themselves in cooking up a stressful situation. They weren’t so keen on pinning down the specifics ...

Ed and Emma got their mortgage on the basis of Ed being in full time employment. Provided by Home Farm. Now he’s lost the job.

They spent the weekend in shock. But stupid Ed would only say Adam had laid him off. Emma stormed over to Home Farm. Adam told her the truth.

You might as well start crying now.

She unleashed pure venom on Ed. Insisted they must not tell the mortgage company. (Bank?) Decided that if they could offer a bigger deposit things would be ok. ( Nope, me neither.) Emma Lost It.

First she asked Jim to lend her a few thousand.

Then Ruth.

Then asked Fallon if she could ‘pretend’ to take on Ed full time at the tea shop. And was nasty to her about her perfect life.

The she asked Peggy to lend her the full price of the new house. While Kate was there.

These people reacted with increasing degrees of embarrassment, fury and disdain. No one even tried to find out why she was asking.

Emma also told her father everything and cajoled him to go to the bank. He was able to raise £15,000 which just made her frantic with disappointment.

Chris offered £3,000 I think.

Tracy and her children emptied their piggy banks and handed over £300.

So she had £20,000. On the Friday they were due to finalise (for some reason neither exchange nor completion make sense in the context so ) Ed insisted on phoning the mortgage provider to tell them about his job loss. (They were to move the following Tuesday.) He was told ‘they no longer meet the criteria’.

QuaterMiss loved your description of Shula's behaviour!

"why didn't Emma apply for the job?* She did - she just did it in Ed;s name

It feels as if even Oliver has given up on him - he arranged to shortlist Tracey and Freddie (who hadn't applied) but not Ed (who had). Linda watched Emma finish Ed's application form and there was a strong suggestion that Emma wrote the whole thing for him. Quite apart from the fact that Ed had already been rejected before Oliver got a chance to say anything, even Oliver might have pondered about giving a job to someone who might not even have been aware that they'd applied for it.

Neil was surprised and pleased that the bank had offered him 15K, he didn't think he'd be able to get as much as that, but Emma then turned on him, saying it wasn't anywhere near enough. He had to tell her she was being out of order.

She completely lost her mind that week and burned a few bridges with her nastiness.

One point not yet mentioned to Badger wrt Emma is DEBT.

Natasha, as we learned, lives on credit.
She persuaded Emma that 'everyone does it' etc, so Emma has been busy buying things on credit for the house they didn't even yet live in. She has been trying to return things, apparently. I suspect Worse Is To Come.

No worse, there is none.
Pitched past pitch of grief more pangs will
Wilder wring ...

I’m off to check if I still remember Gerard Manley Hopkins properly.

Almost!

Here’s the full poem:

“No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall 

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”

Wrong context I know, but I did think of it in relation to poor, sad, maddened Emma.

Similar story to the black horse of England now known as shire horses, and clydesdales.

Sorry coffee but I think you meant Britain not England. Go to Clydesdale and tell someone they are English and see what happens. So irritating when people use England as shorthand for “England and those other unimportant bits”.

I am very much enjoying Tracey.
Long may she reign!

I don't think Emma will be in debt though surely? My assumption being that they will have saved for the house but the house no longer exists so they will have some spare cash?

Or did they lose everything in the deposit? It is all so complicated (and just too awful), I wish they'd made it a little simpler and therefore more realistic.

The Archers will be discussed on Feedback this afternoon! Specifically Ed & Emma apparently.

Quater your summaries are a joy.

Let's hope Emma didn't decide to throw he upcycled coffee table onto the bonfire last night (though didn't it have a marble top)?

Something bad will presumably happen tonight, it being a Friday.

notmuchmore Oh, I didn't think about the money for the deposit being used to pay the catalogue bills. So they'll be back to square one again.

(I am assuming Ed&Emma will reconcile once they realise what's important really).

Why can't Emma return the dinner service and garden furniture?

They've not been used, have they?

Perhaps they were reduced, or 'in the sale', and therefore non refundable.

I know she's trying to return things. Maybe she can, but then the plot disappears (unless it does a lovely turnaround and Ed&Emma are debt free but then Natasha goes under).

Yes, just heard the feedback item trailed and apparently it's about how realistic the Ed and Emma losing job then house SL is, featuring an Academic Archer. BOOP in advance for at least questioning it!

@ppeatfruit

I do, yes

@chemenger

Similar story to the black horse of England now known as shire horses, and clydesdales.

Sorrycoffeebut I think you meant Britain not England. Go to Clydesdale and tell someone they are English and see what happens. So irritating when people use England as shorthand for “England and those other unimportant bits”

I'm a bit offended and confused - I think you may have understood my post differently to how I intended it. The comma was meant to differentiate the two, not lump them together. The black horse (England) which became the Shire horse (England) and, separately bred with different lineage, the horse that became the Clydesdale breed, bred in Scotland.

So let me try to explain myself properly in full.

I really did mean the black horse of England, and that Clydesdales are a separate breed (of a different area). Historians don't really agree on heavy horse history at the best of times, so it might well be that you have an understanding that is different to mine. Some people do think that the Black horse was of Britain and later diverged into two regional breeds. To my best understanding, (having worked for one of the top breeders of Shires, studied the history of British horses, and now working in rural history), there was a hardy, heavy set usually black or dark colour type of horse that farmers in England favoured and bred from, which became the fabled Black Horse of England. Meanwhile Scotland had a similar process going on and produced the Clydesdale. The two breeds were similar, but different. Clydesdales had longer legs, shires were shorter and stockier with a heavier neck and head, and had different shaped feet (suitable for different farmland conditions), and more feather. Both breeds had advantages for the type of land they worked, - see for contrast the Suffolk horse having almost no feather and a different foot shape again, so they could work the heavy Suffolk soil better.

Somewhere after the breeds were established the two got crossed more and more, and now there are (imo weird) breed standard rules that a Shire can have x% clydesdale in their pedigree and still be considered a full Shire... I don't know if the same is true for Clyde's or not. The result is that as a result the two breeds are much more similar than they were 100, 200 years ago.

#endgeek

@Chemenger being a Scot myself I share your irritation at “England” being used as for the U.K./Britain, but I don’t think that was what Coffee did- according to Wikipedia there was a breed called the Old English Black Horse which evolved into the Shire horse. She put a comma before “and Clydesdales” so I don’t think was suggesting that they were also English, simply that they had a similar history to shire horses.

Ha- cross post @Coffeeandchocolate9!

@ArgumentativeAardvaark

(You're much more succinct than me!)

@Coffeeandchocolate9 fascinating- how amazing that horses were bred specifically to have feet that suited a certain soil- must have taken a lot longer to get the spec right than it does now to develop and manufacture specialist tractors!

Ha ha I guess so!

The evolution of all breeds of domesticated animals is fairly simple in principal - if you have a working animal, say a horse who is a nice temperament for what you want to do with it, isn't often lame or sick, is easy to train, you will want to breed from that animal for your next one rather than the one who has taken twice as long to plough the field, is forever jumping at it's own shadow or forgets what to do, and is forever losing a shoe and handing you a sick note!

Sorry Coffee I misread, my bad. Probably too busy imagining a clydesdale kicking Shula in the head and stopping the droning forever.

😂