❓ Archers thread #126: It’s a mystery why we’re all still listening.

[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’d love to be on the Parish Council, 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/4197199--The-Archers-spoilers-thread-6-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 @Taswama for thread title ideas, but I felt most in sympathy with @R4's suggestion. Is it me, or is the programme in the doldrums at the moment?

Haven't heard the 31/3 episode yet. Perhaps it's a gem.

Yes I think you’re probably right (on all counts!)

I'm rather excited for 7pm, I do hope we're not going to have a comedy/change counting episode

I do love that phrase Mumblechum0. It captures those episodes in which Susan or Jim painstakingly take 3 minutes to charge someone £8.59 in the village shop precisely.

I hadn't realised until Weevil's and AskingQuestionsAllTheTime's posts that there were quite so many episodes in which Alice was drunk. I am wondering now if Alice forgetting to tell Ed not to mix up the barley and wheat last summer - can't remember exactly what happened, just that Ed took the blame - was another time in which alcohol played a part.

I saw something on Twitter which might inform the drink driving offence or no drink driving offence debate. Leaders Wood is apparently part of Home Farm so Alice was not on the public highway.

From a completely outside perspective, maybe Martha wouldn't be on a child protection plan but perhaps Alice could get what is called 'early help', like some visits from a Home Start worker. I think the overall assumption would be that Chris would be there to make sure Martha is safe but it would be good to hear from somebody who really knows. I also wonder if Alice would actually accept any offers of help.

I got the impression as I listened, that to Fallon it would have sounded like Harrison was about to confess to an affair.

Alice is definitely more of a danger than Freddie. You have a choice if someone tries to sell you drugs.

For what they are worth, my two cents on Alice's drinking - some people do just end up being alcohol-dependent, as alcohol is an addictive poison no matter who you are, though its effects are obviously affected by circumstances and genetics. Alice's immediate family are all heavy drinkers by any definition, if you look up statistics Brian, Lillian, Kate would all probably be in the top 1-5% of drinkers nationally even if they don't need a drink as soon as they wake up. Alice need not have suffered some dreadful trauma to gradually fall into the alcohol trap.

One other thing that really stuck out for me was when I heard the episode where Alice was born, and Brian was obviously, transparently, hoping for a son and assuming she was a son. That rang so many bells for me because I also come from a family of heavy drinkers and alcoholics and two of those are daughters who feel they would have been preferred as sons, if that makes sense. That is a fundamental characteristic about a person that they are powerless to change and can affect their entire self-image and relationship with their parents from before they can even remember. It's subtle but it's there. I haven't seen anyone talk about this on any Archers fan group I frequent, actually, but it's so close to the experience of people I know.

I expect being in a male-dominated profession where there might be a culture of drinking to keep up with "the boys" didn't help either. That's almost paralleled in her marriage with Chris, where he drank an amount that was manageable, even fun for him, but Alice with her lower tolerance as a woman was endangered by the same amount.

so maybe they really do plan stuff years in advance the alcoholic Alice story has been years in the making. I think Fallon's reaction shows how well she's concealed it. I would agree that Harrison needs to tell Chris for all the reasons outlined by Fallon. Keeping it secret is doing her no favours. I hope Jazzer gets back into pigs.

You don’t end up on a child protection plan without help having been offered beforehand (apart from extreme cases), yes Early Help etc.

Don’t see why Brian and especially Kate would be in top 5% of drinkers?

That is a fundamental characteristic about a person that they are powerless to change and can affect their entire self-image and relationship with their parents from before they can even remember. It's subtle but it's there.
I totally identify with this.

culture of drinking to keep up with "the boys" didn't help either. That's almost paralleled in her marriage with Chris, where he drank an amount that was manageable, even fun for him, but Alice with her lower tolerance as a woman was endangered by the same amount.
and this.

That's a really helpful post CeciledeVolanges. It certainly puts Alice's drinking in context. That bit about the two women in your family feeling that they 'should' have been a son is very sad. In Ambridge, all Brian's older children are desperate for his approval except Kate and she is the one who seems to be best at getting him to do what she wants. So far, it looks as if Ruari will have the easiest relationship with Brian but that might not just be about his sex but also because he's the youngest.

I also identify with the desperate for approval, although I'm a bit more Kate, in that I was never going to get approval, so either played up to get any attention or retreated into myself. It hasn't scarred me or anything but it did mould aspects of my personality.

The Aldridge family dynamic is strange. There's the stepson, the 'perfect' step-daughter, the black sheep, the one who 'should have been a boy' and we have the 'affair child' myson.

the two women in your family feeling that they 'should' have been a son is very sad

Yet on MN there are so many gender disappointment threads. If my parents were disappointed that I wasn't born a boy, that is their problem not mine.

nettie434
I am wondering now if Alice forgetting to tell Ed not to mix up the barley and wheat last summer - can't remember exactly what happened, just that Ed took the blame - was another time in which alcohol played a part.

I think it certain; she didn't want to take that job because she was drunk all the time, only Brian simply assumed and she couldn't give him the real reason for her not to. She was drunk or about to have a drink every time we heard her at work during that month, possibly apart from the day on which she convinced herself Ed was trying to tell her that he fancied her -- and I have my doubts about that day, because she certainly wasn't able to understand him when he spoke to her, and got an idea fixed in her head from which she wasn't able to budge, which seemed pretty drunk to me.

I saw something on Twitter which might inform the drink driving offence or no drink driving offence debate. Leaders Wood is apparently part of Home Farm so Alice was not on the public highway.

It belongs to Home Farm but there is a public highway running through it, so yes, she was guilty of an offence -- "being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle". No ifs, buts or maybes: she was drunk, she was in the car, she is guilty as charged if she had been charged. It doesn't matter whether she was driving at the time she was drunk or not, for that one: it doesn't even matter whether she was actually in the car, or conscious, because sleeping it off on the back seat with the keys in your pocket is still "in charge", and so is walking round and round the block to sober up.

And anyway, you can be done for that in a private car-park, which isn't a public highway. You can be done for it on your own front drive. It's a really all-encompassing bit of law. If you can be seen by a member of the public then it's a public place, like the top of a tor in Dartmoor with the nearest road five miles away: if you could get a car there, and you were drunk, then you'd be guilty.

"In English law it is an offence to be:
…”in charge of a motor vehicle on a road or other public place after consuming so much alcohol that the proportion of it in your breath, blood or urine exceeds the prescribed limit”"

@GotBeatenUp

the two women in your family feeling that they 'should' have been a son is very sad

Yet on MN there are so many gender disappointment threads. If my parents were disappointed that I wasn't born a boy, that is their problem not mine.

I had the opposite problem: I was the longed-for girl after two boys and five miscarriages. I was definitely a tomboy in many ways: wore my brothers' cast-offs by choice, liked cars and Meccano and riding my bike and climbing trees and running, hated pink, good at maths... And my darling mother sucked it up and encouraged me to be myself and do my own thing, always. She was a wonderful woman, my mum.

That's lovely, Asking. It's a wonderful gift to be accepted and loved for what you are.

It's a very good point about Alice not being Brian's longed for son. Siobhan's child really had to be a son, for dramatic purposes. It made things even worse for Jennifer than they would have been anyway.

@Darker

I don't have any sympathy for Alice- drinking the way she did whilst pregnant was despicable. Even if you accept she can't help her drinking she has a choice to stop driving- drunk drivers are the lowest of the low

Which is why Alice can't get the help she desperately needs for herself and wants it to be a secret. Shame is a terribly destructive emotion.

Alice is making no attempt to get help. I have no sympathy for her at all.

It's not going to be a secret if she kills someone when she's driving drunk. I have zero sympathy for anyone who chooses to drink and drive (and tbh none for women who drink when pregnant)

AskingQuestionsAllTheTime, thanks for those clarifications - and for sharing that about your mum. As GotBeatenUp said, it is still too common to see preferences being expressed in families about a baby's sex. Gasp0de is right that the aim should be accepting everyone for who they are.

Alice is making no attempt to get help. I have no sympathy for her at all.

Alice went to the clinic, speaks to her sponsor, attended a meeting, speaks to Chris with an attempt at honesty, has reconciled with her SiL, reached out to Harrison. The help she needs is out of her reach because everyone thinks the baby will fix it.

It's not going to be a secret if she kills someone when she's driving drunk.

Hmm. I wonder if the SWs will go there?

Asking's mum sounds great. Mine is in some ways.

It was never hidden from me that it had been a disappointment that I hadn't been a boy. I suspect that it wasn't just my family. I can think of one or two other farming families with no sons but more than one daughter. We're talking late 1960s. You could choose whether or not to have a child, large families were old-fashioned.

I don't think Alice had that, but after Kate, her parents probably found Alice an easy child. I got the sense that Brian was a bit disappointed that Alice didn't go to Oxford, and both B &JD were a bit disappointed that she had settled for the local farrier. JD hadhigh hopes that Alice would marry into the county set.

@JanFebAnyMonth

You don’t end up on a child protection plan without help having been offered beforehand (apart from extreme cases), yes Early Help etc.

Don’t see why Brian and especially Kate would be in top 5% of drinkers?

It was a bit of an extrapolation, but from Annie Grace's "This Naked Mind": "According to Paying the Tab by Philip J. Cook, if you drink a single glass of wine each night you're in the top 30% of all drinkers. If it's two glasses, you're in the top 20%." You're not seriously telling me Brian and Kate stop at two glasses a night, let alone Lilian...

@BoreOfWhabylon

It's not going to be a secret if she kills someone when she's driving drunk.

Hmm. I wonder if the SWs will go there?

A dedding!

May I volunteer Pip and Rosie to be dedded.
If Hannah could be with them, even better.

Marthyr could be another one.

**these are my fictional characters.

Who did Helen drive into when she was drunk? Mike Tucker?

Yes

@Darker

Alice is making no attempt to get help. I have no sympathy for her at all.

Alice went to the clinic, speaks to her sponsor, attended a meeting, speaks to Chris with an attempt at honesty, has reconciled with her SiL, reached out to Harrison. The help she needs is out of her reach because everyone thinks the baby will fix it.

The help she needs is not out of her reach because everyone thinks the baby will fix it. It's out of her reach because she refuses to make anything beyond a token effort to look for it.

And she's still lying to her sister-in- law. She's made no effort to let Emma know Emma was in the right.

I give up. Alcoholism is hard to recover from. You only need to read a few threads here to understand the enormity of the struggle. Alice not succeeding does not mean Alice is not trying, but changing your whole self is not the work of a two week stint in a clinic.