💰 Archers thread #121: Brookfield digs for treasure, Alice & Philip try to bury the truth. Dish the dirt here if you dig The Archers. PS Send nudes.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Thank you, @PseudoBadger, for kicking off this long, long series of Archers threads.

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 long to hear Pip again, 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/3853783--The-Archers-spoilers-thread-5-Cant-wait-for-7-02pm-Join-us-here, 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 @LillianGish and @PersephonePromotesEquanimity for the title suggestions.

Current events: as @Bailey0703 has astutely spotted, it's Anti-Slavery Day tomorrow - could this herald the beginning of the end of the horses storyline? I do hope so. Horrible stuff, but what a blow for Kirsty. They're laying on the dramatic irony with trowel at the moment.

What do we think will happen to Alice and Chris? I can't see this pregnancy going to term and ending well. I don't think the marriage will survive either, giving Brian a chance to revisit his classic line about having to treat this as Alice's starter marriage.

Will Elizabeth end up on a date with Vince Casey? That would put the cat among the pigeons at Lower Loxley.

Over to you ...

It annoys me that so often on soaps, especially on TV, they often behave as if there are no employment rights or anything - one slight disagreement, and that's it, out the door, no hint of a disciplinary process or anything

Mind you, it also works the other way in soapland. If someone wants to leave their job they do so within the space of one episode, there's never any nonsense about making them serve out their notice. And their replacement tends to turn up shortly afterwards with no hint of a fair recruitment process.

Yes, that's just as annoying.

Pip hasn't thought this through at all. There is nowhere obvious for Toby to move within Ambridge. If he moves a relatively short distance, say 20 miles, it will still screw up his ability to collect Rosie from nursery at short notice, as Pip asked him to do on Thursday.

If he moves an hour's drive away, then parenting is going to get a lot harder for Pip. It would be a two hour round trip for her to drop Rosie off and return to Brookfield. The mutually advantageous informal set up they have now will become unworkable.

Plus Rex babysits on occasion, too, doesn't he? Jill babysat when Rosie was new, but presumably at 90 can't run after a toddler. So where will that leave Pip?

It's definitely a nose-cutting exercise, in fact. Good.

Toby could move his pigs to the massive orchard behind the tearoom that nobody knew about until this summer. Hasn't Adam got an orchard full of cherry trees too?

I don't suppose that Bridge Farm would particularly want Rex's pigs on their land, after having "got out of pigs". Natasha wants all that land for her ploys, doesn't she?

And their replacement tends to turn up shortly afterwards with no hint of a fair recruitment process

Actual recruiting in Ambridge tends to be by exception - most jobs go to mates or ex cons who are family friends. Even where a job is advertised the crony candidate tends to get the job.

Ian was the last complete outsider wasn't he? Even Hannah was a returner.

Rob was the last outsider. That turned out well...

Oh also Anisha.

Jakob wasn’t really recruited because he already worked for the vet practice that bought Alistair’s.

There are some business units somewhere, aren't there? My mind's gone absolutely blank as to who set them up, where, what we've ever heard about them - except, was that where Tom made his sausages with the help of the criminally underused Maurice the ex-butcher, Alistair's Gamblers Anonymous mentor? I find I can't remember if Tom even makes sausages nowadays. (What's worse, I also find I don't care much. )

No idea if any of them could be used for Toby's gin, either in terms of the space being suitable or the rent affordable.

Found myself listening to the omnibus and throughly enjoyed hearing Rex tearing into Pip the second time.

The business units are at Sawyer's Farm, which is on the road south of the Am past The Stables and Brookfield out of the village, and take a left fork just after Heydon Farm instead of going on to Bridge Farm.

They were set up by Simon Pemberton when he was running the Estate, I am fairly sure, and for a while in the late nineties Susan ran them when she was the Estate secretary, having taken over from Peggy there and I think having worked as a cleaner there first.

They are "business units" but Tom did and does also have a unit there for his sausage making (which is still done except Tom no longer uses his own pigs for it), as well as the Estate Office being there, and I think Pryce Baumann have recently moved there because Alice suggested it. Alistair Lloyd knocked two of them together and had his surgery there, with approval from Graham Ryder and so presumably from Simon. (That pair of units was where Tom thought of putting his sausage business when Alistair moved out to the stables, but I think he ended up making an offer on one which had been empty for years and getting a good price on it.)

I don't see why Toby's gin distillery wouldn't be able to be moved there; two of the local brewerys in this area are in "business units" that are converted farm buildings.

Is Toby distilling now? I thought he was just blending botanicals into bought base spirit.

I listened again, the motorists were doing a lot of beeping while Ruth and Ben were getting the last of the cattle safe, before the clang of the gate being shut. I thought Ruth's reactions were not at all inappropriate - I doubt the drivers could hear what she was saying.

He has said more than once that he distils his gin, and other people have mentioned it too, so I suppose he must be.

Anyway, the BBC seem to think so: after the first mention of the idea on 6th November, 2016
Toby eventually reveals his plans to set up a gin distillery

their synopsis for Tuesday, 17 January 2017 includes
Toby has a lot to do to make the building at Hollowtree fit for gin distillation and Environmental Health will be visiting soon [sic] than he expected.
and
Toby pays a call on Bert, sure that he will sort out the distillery.

and on Thursday 19th July, 2018 they say
Toby finds Pip staring at her phone and assumes it's to do with the imminent birth, though Pip is quick to refute this and complains about the heat, the long wait for the baby and allied matters. Toby is on edge and when Pip feels a twinge, decides to abandon the distillery to his new assistant Stan.

Thanks... I knew he wasn't distilling to start with, and probably haven't paid much attention to the minutiae of Toby's enterprise since then. The very notion of him being able to distil reliably without risking turning half of Borsetshire blind probably blocked it from my ears.

Autocorrect just tried to turn 'borsetshire' into 'horse t-shirt'.

Found myself listening to the omnibus and throughly enjoyed hearing Rex tearing into Pip the second time. Yes, good, wasn't it? Notice Pip's use of "difficult decisions" - "difficult" when allied to "decisions" always appears to mean "things I decide to do to the benefit of myself and my cronies which are deeply disadvantageous to other people/sections of society that I don't really care about".

But why, FFS, would a metal detectorist mess around breaking a padlock when they could simply hop over the gate? Breaking the padlock's what you do when you need the gate open, to take a vehicle through. So possibly fly tippers, cattle rustlers, someone who already knows that the treasure trove is so huge that they'll need to load it directly into a vehicle rather than simply stuff it into a rucksack.

Not metal detectorists who altruistically decide to give Ruth an excuse to have a go at Ben.

Thanks, Asking, I knew you'd have the details at your fingertips.

But why, FFS, would a metal detectorist mess around breaking a padlock when they could simply hop over the gate?

Not all gates are hop-overable, and not all people are capable of gate-hopping.

(Ffs what is autocorrect on? It tried to turn 'gate' into 'hate' as soon as I typed the hyphen)

And we know it wasn't fly tippers or cattle rustlers because the cattle were there and junk wasn't.

ErrolTheDragon
Thanks... I knew he wasn't distilling to start with

But he was! He came back from Brighton on 6th November, 2016, with a still on his pickup, and set it up in Rickyard Cottage. Before that he'd thought about making sloe gin like wot the Grundys do, but was stymied by a lack of sloes.

When David discovered what was going on (probably from Kenton, to whom Toby had tried to sell some very young gin for the pub on 18th) he quite rightly said he wouldn't have an unlicensed still on his farm, and that either it went, or Toby and Pip and it went. That was on 25th November.

So then Toby went off to bully Rex about Hollowtree, on 5th December.

Am I going to have to come back and explain the gin process again. Did you not pay attention the last time? I should have set a test to consolidate your learning.

Toby does distil his gin, but he starts with base spirit (effectively vodka, flavourless grain alcohol). He blends that with his botanicals and then boils it up, distilling over the alcohol plus the volatile flavours of the botanical, giving his gin it’s unique taste and smell (wet dog presumably, going by the name). What he doesn’t do is produce the alcohol by fermentation then distillation, that is well beyond his capabilities and the scale of his operation. You need to know what you’re doing or you can poison people and the excise measures are very stringent if you’re actually producing spirit rather than just processing it. At one point he discussed using whey from Helen’s cheese but even the SWs must has realised that was not going to be realistic. Pretty much anyone could do what he does. I’ve advised one of our local pubs about starting a micro gin distillery and I can’t really believe anyone could know less about what they were trying to do, even Toby. They’re pretty successful now.

Come the zombie apocalypse my barterable skill will be making gin.

@Chemenger, I'm sure you'll do very well out of it. The ZA can't be far off now, given the increasingly apocalyptic news this year.

Is this one of your interns? www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3N3QMp44kbbHwzkzCsgsRtC/from-life-long-fan-to-writer-helen-aitken-joins-the-writing-team-of-the-archers

Ah right - he's redistilling, rather than distilling from scratch. I'd somehow missed that, I'd somehow got the impression it was just an infusion process.

(Some slight typo on 'right' tried to jump to Rihanna. And then when I tried to post I jumped onto a random thread on FWR. I'm glad I'm not trying to work today!)