🎄Archers thread #122: Deck the Hall with Eddie, Freddie 🎵 'Tis the Season to be jolly (but orange juice for you, Alice)

[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 love Bert Fry’s poetry (as I do), 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 @C8H10N4O2 for requesting an annoyingly cheerful thread title which might take us up to Christmas and to @Prestissimo for the title suggestion. I was strongly tempted by @LillianGish’s suggestion: Eddie’s turkeys, Freddie’s show, village green with lights aglow, Stir Up Sunday, Deck the Hall, Merry Christmas one and all - with apologies to Bert Fry and @R4’s suggestion Wassail to the Ambridge Not-A-Panto where Freddie gets nine LESSONS in directing from CAROLe Lynda. Top work, all!

Three days to go until we can return to Ambridge.

My list for Father Christmas

In the next few weeks I’d like:

• Freddie’s show to be a huge success

• Philip and Gavin to be driven out of the village with pitchforks into the waiting arms of the police, and the three ‘horses’ rescued and taken in by kind people who will help them turn their lives around

• Pip to take a perpetual vow of silence and leave for a nunnery

• a terrific Grundy Christmas (although the travails of Alice and Chris will overshadow things)

• Alice to lose the baby, as this seems the least grim option for us listeners; she leaves Chris and makes a fresh start of some kind

What do you all want for Christmas from The Archers?

16 weeks I thought, as she said at the post-bleed scan that her last scan had been 4 weeks ago and you don’t normally get a routine one till 12 weeks. Is it possible that the scan was done when she was in hospital after being found blind drunk in a ditch? In which case it might not have been 12 weeks. Or was it a routine scan?

I'm in an area that has been under quite severe Covid restrictions almost continuously since March. I know one person who has died, and one person who had it and survived. It's inevitable that the distribution is going to be patchy within communities rather than evenly spread, so one person will know several people who've had it, and another will know no-one. So quite possible that Ambridge so far hasn't seen any cases. It would also have been possible for it to have seen an outbreak of soap opera proportions.

It will be very good for Freddie to backtrack over Eddie and have to sweet talk him around. A useful people skill. And maybe he'll learn to think a bit wider, and not treat casting (or any similar problem) as a problem of dropping balls into boxes rather than thinking of the interactions between them.

I don't think there needs to be a Covid storyline per se; I just wish there'd be a bit more detail of how people are living life fundamentally differently - e.g. here in the country we are meeting our friends a lot to go for walks; having to remember your face mask when you go on an errand; catching up with friends & family via Zoom; talk about when/if you'll be able to go on holiday again, etc...

Given that nobody in Ambridge travels further than Felpersham or Borchester, and only go there if necessary, they might not have come into contact with any COVID carriers.

The figures for an area can depend on things like hospitals and care homes being in that area. The high rate of deaths where I live is probably partly due to the district hospital being here.

Countrywide, the figures at the moment are
21,661 Covid cases per million of our population
798 deaths per million population

There are nine hundred or so people in Ambridge. Statistically none of them having caught it isn't that incredible really.

If you don't know anyone who's got it or died of it that's not entirely surprising. One of my daughters lives in a small town and is plugged into the Young Mums Network, which includes nurses and teachers, and when I last heard she knew of no cases in that small town at all. I knew one person in America who has died of it, and two people in this country who've had it quite badly and recovered well. Just lucky I guess.

It would also have been possible for it to have seen an outbreak of soap opera proportions

Widderbeth picks it up from Vince, then infects Russ, Lily, Freddie and Jill. You may use a bonus unknown but pre-existing medical condition on ONE of the middle four characters.
There. 'panto' menace averted!

@MikeUniformMike deaths are recorded by home address not place of death

Ok.

I live in inner London. I think there's a good chance my husband had it very mildly in March, and I might have done. In mid-March he spent half an hour having coffee with friends who both went down with it a few days later. One was very unwell at home but then made a full recovery. The other was so unwell that in normal times she would undoubtedly have been admitted to hospital, but as it was she stayed at home and slowly recovered, with fortunately no long-lasting after effects. My husband was a little unwell for a few days and lost his sense of taste and smell, but that was all. I felt mildy unwell around the same time but didn't lose taste and smell. I've had an antibody test twice now (for a research study) and it's been negative both times, but apparently the antibodies don't hang around in the blood for longer than two or three months, so who knows.

Several other friends have also had it at varying times from March to early summer. Nobody recently. Everyone mentioned so far is over 50, in some cases over 60.

One acquaintance had it in the spring and has been left with longer-term problems. He's in his 40s.

On the Scottish island where my parents live, there have been hardly any cases until the last couple of weeks. Nobody really ill so far, fortunately. They were very isolated indeed during the main lockdown as the Scottish government restricted the ferries to residents and people with official business on the island. The increase recently seems to be linked to a big funeral attended by a large party from the mainland and the return from university of a few students. My parents are in their late 80s. The island is a magnet for retirees and if Covid did spread through their numbers it would be grim. Fortunately they are all being very sensible.

Ambridge will be a lot more like where Mum and Dad live than where I live, although there are commuters in Ambridge. I'd have expected to hear a little about how odd it is to see them all around during the day while on furlough or wfh.

Shouldn't we be hearing from/ about Chris is her sheltered housing/ care home?
Can't imagine they'd have escaped entirely
Or have I missed any reference?

Shouldn't we be hearing from/ about Chris is her sheltered housing/ care home? Can't imagine they'd have escaped entirely A couple of months ago it was still only about 30% of care homes that had had a case. Care homes either get no cases at all or lots of cases. The only thing you'd be hearing about Chris is that nobody has been allowed to see her since the beginning of March.

Care homes either get no cases at all or lots of cases

Not sure that's true. At the home where my mother is, they've only had one case amongst the residents, and three asymptomatic cases amongst staff. Fortunately no deaths.

@MereDintofPandiculation

Shouldn't we be hearing from/ about Chris is her sheltered housing/ care home? Can't imagine they'd have escaped entirely A couple of months ago it was still only about 30% of care homes that had had a case. Care homes either get no cases at all or lots of cases. The only thing you'd be hearing about Chris is that nobody has been allowed to see her since the beginning of March.

Well nobody was bothering to see her anyway, Jill and Leonard stopped going once they found each other, and Helen was only using it as an excise to meet Lee.

excuse to see Lee

Referring to the listeners in the car park, we were once at Tucson airport in the US, not a particularly British orientated place like Orlando, I was listening to the omnibus during the Helen trial on my Kindle and suddenly realised that there were four or five people standing round listening, cheering her on! We then had a mini symposium about the Archers, much to the amazement of other travellers.

🎄Had planned to be stirring up during the omnibus. But even second time around it's too engrossing. And horrible.

I don't think the GP really had much choice. He had to put the baby first...

@MoonJelly, Alice is his patient, and one option open to her is a termination.

Thank you to other pp who have commented on how unsatisfactory this consultation was, although possibly realistic, I don’t know.

Obviously it’s done now, but I’m a bit surprised to see a jokey reference to Alice’s and her foetus’ traumatic situation in the title. I’ve clearly got a SOH failure.

• grammar fail 🤷🏻‍♀️

Thank you for that fabulous précis of Brenda’s life and times, @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g!! And your excellent post on Christmas. Really great discussion (almost 😉) always guaranteed on this thread.

(I’ll now stop spamming the thread!)

Sorry if it upsets you @SparklingLime - I did consider the wording quite carefully before I suggested it. Obviously alcoholism isn’t a joke, and neither are foetal
abnormalities.

Just to stick up a bit for my GP colleagues I’m really dismayed about the general dissatisfaction displayed here. There are clearly hundreds of things that could have been discussed in this consultation. But (and I appreciate that this consultation was, of course, scripted, so maybe the dissatisfaction is aimed at the scriptwriters rather than the GP himself) patients come in to see us and we generally have no idea what they’re going to talk about. It could literally be anything. We have to manage the situation there and then. No “just give me five minutes to collect my thoughts and I’ll be with you”. Distraught consultations such as Alice’s take far, far longer than the standard, allotted 10 minutes - and rightly so. But you can’t possibly cover everything in that first consultation even with extra time. You are meeting a patient and trying to establish rapport, gain their trust. They are distressed. Their accompanying relative is distressed. You’re trying to think wtf needs doing now, immediately, so therefore needs discussing now, even in the face of a distraught patient. And then you’re making a mental list of things to look up, things to arrange once the patient has left, things you need to talk about next time you see them. It’s really complex. And generally GPs are good at it, because we’re generalists who know a little bit about a lot of things. The beauty of being a GP is that I can ring patients up an hour later (or often a few days later when I’ve woken up at 3am with a sudden important thought) and say “can you come back in, we need to talk some more”. It’s not an emergency service, lots of what we do is done over a period of time, even time-sensitive things like discussing late abortions (the in-depth pros and cons of which are not a GP’s job). I’m sorry to put a dampener on a lighthearted thread but honestly guys.

Let’s give the SWs some credit and consider that they’ve introduced a GP into this scenario and so it’s entirely possible that we will hear more discussions about Alice, her baby, and their health at a later date.

That’s a great insight into the reality of being a GP, @Prestissimo, thank you.

(I’m not “upset“ by the title, just surprised.)

Thanks, @SparklingLime, I do enjoy rabbiting on about the Archers.

Re the title - it was my decision to choose it, and it never occurred to me that it might be seen as inappropriate. Pregnant or not, Alice should be getting support to switch to orange juice for the sake of her liver and her mental health. There was a request for a light-hearted title and Prestissimo's suggestion seemed to me to fit the bill, given that we are dealing with a soap opera, not real life.

Thanks for all your efforts at work and insights here, @Prestissimo. The last year must have been a nightmare for everyone in the NHS, in all sorts of ways.

Not a year any of us are going to forget in a hurry.

@Prestissimo I think that the criticism is mostly aimed at the scriptwriters rather than GPs and I very much acknowledge what a difficult job you do and how much “thinking on your feet” you have to do. However with a patient in Alice’s situation I just cannot get past the fact that surely the most important question of all would be “Do you want to keep this baby?”. After all the GP jumped ahead and started talking about involving social services to enforce appropriate parenting, without checking that the alcoholic patient actually wanted to be a parent at all, or at least reminding her of the option not to be.

I just feel that it was a very pro-life presumption on the part of the GP.

@CheetasOnFajitas you’re right - of course it’s a conversation that has to be had. But I don’t think we can assume that the GP is ‘pro-life’ or a misogynist because he didn’t ask it in the first 20 minutes of knowing this woman. PPs have said that it would be better done without Chris in the room - yes, definitely. So my point is that the first, chaotic and heavily-charged, encounter is not necessarily the best time.

Maybe the next consultation (which we may or may not hear) will start with “let’s talk about how you feel about this pregnancy”. Much easier when you both know each other a bit and have some of the sobbing and “I can’t even say it” out of the way.