I have been away from the radio for a bit and without internet access, so I'm catching up; if there is room for one post with replies to things here, then I will just add these replies to things from this thread which have caught my attention....
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ReindeerBelieve
I'm still wanting to know when we find out how Stella knows Justin from before
We already have, on 3rd October, 2021:
"Justin is at a meal with Stella, in a restaurant with a view overlooking the Hassett Hills, a good long way from Ambridge. She feels she is doing well at her new job, with no nasty surprises: it's all pretty much as he described when he tipped her off about it. She apparently did well over at a farm Cambridge in which Damara holds a stake."
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Scarydinosaurs
awful as what Alice said I get the impression her therapy and recovery has shown her how important healthy communication is. All of her relationships are better now: with Chris, with Susan etc
Her communication with Ruairi is not healthy, though.
She is doing the equivalent of stalking him: pestering him, insisting on intruding when he has made it clear she is not wanted, demanding that he has to be nice to her, telling him that he has to forgive her because she has said sorry...
A big part of his staying away from Ambridge was almost certainly in order to avoid Alice and her continual emotional demands on him.
One thing generally emphasised on drink recovery courses is that you should not try to force people to accept your apologies for very real harm done to them while you were drunk, and that some of them may never be prepared to accept your penitence or relate to you as they did before or as you wish them to.
It is not up to you whether they do: it is up to them.
And if they are not prepared to, you must back off until they are ready, if they ever are.
And this is going to be revealed more as she helps R. I’m sure we’re going to hear an insight into why she drank, and how addressing that helped her stop.
She was first heard on air getting drunk when she was sixteen; she got together with Chris because she got so drunk at a night-club that she was incapable of standing up and he helped her to get home to Ambridge by getting her into a taxi; she was getting so drunk at university that she could not remember what had happened on the previous night and woke up with someone not her husband; she was drunk at Nic's funeral....
This is not something she will know the "why" of, it's something she has been doing all her adult life.
(And it started before she knew that Ruairi existed, so her father having been unfaithful to her mother was not the reason for it.)
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KeepingTheWaterOut
This may be a stupid question.
Adam's father was Paddy Redmond, but when Jennifer married Roger Travers-Macy, he was adopted by him, becoming Adam Macy.
So why is Debbie called Debbie Aldridge? Surely she should be Debbie Macy, too, as the child of Jennifer and Roger's marriage?
If it was more convenient for her to take her step father Brian's name, why did Adam stick with the surname Macy?
Not stupid at all.
Roger Travers-Macy refused to allow Brian to adopt his children, so they kept the name Travers-Macy; Adam shortened it, Debbie dumped it as soon as she could.
She elected to be called Aldridge when she went to university as an adult, changed her name to Gerrard on her marriage with Simon Gerrard, and then went back to Aldridge after their divorce.
Travers-Macy tried to win back her affection by giving her a car for her twenty-first birthday and promising to finance her in an antiques venture, but didn't come through with the money and then had a sexual affair with Jennifer, which Debbie found out about; this spoiled any chance of them having a friendly relationship, especially since she then gave him his marching orders on pain of her telling Brian about it.
(Her mother being unfaithful didn't make her go off the deep end the way her father turning out to have done so did: perhaps she was more sensitive about infidelity in men after Simon Gerrard's behaviour.)
The strange thing was that the divorce came through at about the time she discovered her step-father's infidelity to her mother and the existence of Ruairi, and was so generally angry and distressed that she fled the country rather than go on working with/for Brian, so you'd think she might have chosen to take a different surname from his; changing your surname is quite easy to do after a divorce, or at least a lot easier than it is at other times.
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Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g
Peggy's year of birth (should be 1925)
According the The Book of The Archers, The Archers Encyclopaedia, the Archers Who's Who books, and the BBC Website, Peggy was born on 13th November 1924.