Archers thread #145: The glue that held the Aldridges together is gone. Will they fall apart? Discuss The Archers here.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

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

All views on The Archers welcome here! New blood welcomed, and of course we are always delighted to welcome back former or occasional listeners/posters. We don't all agree on all points, although we do mostly try to be civil about it.

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/4636789-the-archers-spoilers-thread-7-cant-wait-for-702pm-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.)

Lillian and I both made the glue observation, so I thought that would be as good a way as any to kick off this new thread. We raced through the last one, for obvious reasons. This one may last until the funeral. Will Tamsin Greig find time to attend? I do hope so.

The poem Jennifer quoted in her journal is here: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43775/rabbi-ben-ezra It's doubtful whether the last of Jennifer's life was the best, but she had plenty to contend with all the way through.

Over to you!

This is a bit of a rude reply, the poster was just speculating, as we all are as we aren’t the writers.

I can think of a few examples where the wife has died young or youngish and the widower lived to a ripe old age. We're talking about 30 yrs of being widowed.

I can't think of many who remarried. The one I can think of, his wife was killed in a car accident. She was lovely, and it was a bit weird to imagine him without her, then with a second wife. He's died now but his second wife is still alive, and she is still sort of mum's friend's husband's second wife.

A friend's father remarried. He found a girlfriend quite soon after being widowed, then another one then another one and got married to somebody.
I never got my head round that one as there was a lot of drama. A lot.
Maybe truth is stranger than fiction.

I don't begrudge them but both women were lovely and one-offs and it's just too much for my little imagination. I suppose I would have felt like that if Oliver Stirling had married Tracy Horrobin.

Oh, crumbs, they're not going to do that with Brian are they?

I think I was the one who mentioned Sellotape. I've heard of Scotch Tape, but for me sticky tape is Sellotape, immaterial of brand, in the same way that all ballpoint pens are Biros and all vacuum cleaners are Hoovers, or were until recently.

I find I just can't remember what life was like with less plastic. Did we have plastic shopping bags in the 1970s? Safeway had brown paper bags, I believe.

@RandomCatGenerator , it can be interpreted as rude, but it coul be interpreted as factual, but we haven't been given any indication that he might be in the early stages of dementia

There were plastic bags in the 70s, but IIRC you usually took a shopping bag or basket.
I don't remember having all the 'stuff' we have today, but maybe my home wasn't typical. Groceries came from the village shop in a cardboard box. A supermarket was Kwiks, which was a no frills affair.
Food like yogurt was in plastic pots, but milk was in glass bottles.

We didn't eat out and didn't have takeaways or ready meals. Everything was home cooked from scratch, other than bread. Fish & chips was a rare treat.
I was quite young inn the 70s, and we didn't have pop, 'juice' or 'snacks'.

I don't remember the vast array of cleaning products that's available now.
I think that they were in bottles not plastic spray bottles.

World's gone mad.

Yeo valley yoghurts were in waxed cardboard pots in the early 2000s. I used to wash and dry them and use them as fire lighters. They're plastic now.

TottersBlankly
"if Brian had gone first,"
It is piercing to realise he must have spent two thirds of his life anticipating exactly this.

He had no particular reason to expect to predecease her, really; he was only about fourteen months older than she was.

Watching Gold the other evening with the subtitles on for DH (😡) and when asked what they were expecting instead of gold bullion the subtitles read ‘potatoes’.

Amused me.

I disagree on this one. Advance booking is semi-understandable (on the grounds that you could book something for immediate use or for the future, but I think most bookings would, in practice, be in advance of expected use), but pre-ordering is definitely a separate thing from plain old ordering. If I order a book from the library, I expect that them to already own the book and just be waiting for a previous user to return it. If I pre-order a book from Amazon, my expectation is that the book has not yet been published and thus I am pre-ordering it for non-immediate delivery.

I used to be a grammar pedant, but I mellowed through studying linguistics academically. I still find it interesting, and certain things grate more than others, but there's a lot of stuff I can happily let slide in others. However, I want to tear the tongue out of the person leading my first aid course who repeatedly used the word 'myself' when she meant 'me'.

Oh I was thinking "Was there a big age gap between them then?"

Ah shopping en famille in the 70s:!:""":green shield stamps....

Scotch tape is not another form of what I call sellotape though, it is a different thing altogether! Partially opaque, thicker, respoitionable...

Ah shopping en famille in the 70s:!:""":green shield stamps....

The look of sheer satisfaction on my father’s face as he came back from paying for the petrol …

Frustratingly I cannot now remember what they did say …

Women have higher life expectancy than men, though, and Jennifer's mother seems almost immortal, so I think IRL in similar circumstances one would have expected Jennifer to outlive Brian.

I may have a skewed sample, because I happen to have known more widowers than widows (maybe as many as three to one), and the widows have mostly been because of men who died the moment they retired or even a little before then, leaving their wives to cope without them possibly for decades. So I would tend to expect the opposite, which I find a bit frightening; it seems to unfair on Himself.

Always difficult not to be influenced by personal associations. I suppose I mostly think of my own family, where most of the women have lived well into their 80s and in many cases into their 90s. Not many of the men have reached 90. Most didn't reach 80.

I can remember Sainsbury’s plastic carrier bags in 1982.

Does anyone remember the scene in The Graduate (1968) where the self-important man at the party takes Benjamin aside to dispense career advice and says. "I have one word for you. Plastics"?

"Scotch" is the generic French word for sticky tape I seem to recall from my au pair days.

I was very confused by all the glad-wrapping going on in the Antipodes until I realised it was just cling film!

I'm a bit confused as to why Alice doesn't already have a standing arrangement with Chris to have Martha on the day of her AA meeting. Unless of course it was Jenny who was the regular sitter?

In the 1960s my Mum used to bring groceries home from Fine Fare in a cardboard box. We also had a shopping basket and a net bag.

@TottersBlankly

Pesetas.

I presume it was young folk who don’t know old money.

Automated? But you'd think someone would check. However, I saw a tweet the other day from Dave Davies of The Kinks begging Twitter not to tag all the tweets from the official Kinks account with a warning that they might have sensitive/offensive content, and that's undoubtedly automated, so who knows.

You agree with my original point then Advance, rather than AdvancED, bookings? Pre-ordering was a side issue.

Scotch tape is just another brand of sticky tape Precisely. The person who said “sticky tape is Sellotape” had forgotten that other brands were available.

I think when they constantly referred to sticky tape on Blue Peter (because they weren't allowed to use brand names) we all assumed they meant sellotape. Scotch tape wasn't nearly as well known.