Archers thread #156: Fireworks in Ambridge! Helen gave Lee a rocket, but Grey Gables is a damp squib. Is the writing on the (church) wall?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. Most of us are posting tongue in cheek a lot of the time, so don't worry about revealing that you're irresistibly attracted to George Grundy, 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/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.)

Thanks to @OverArmour for the title suggestion, which I have tweaked a bit. I was strongly tempted by Less GGP (Grey Gables Peril) More GPP (Guinea Pig Plot), which was a plaintive cry from @PuppyPerson some days ago, but if Poppy has found new homes for the baby guinea pigs that may be the last we hear of them for some time, sadly.

Surely in the life of the next thread we must hear more from or of Rob, or Ron as some on this thread prefer to call him? <taps foot> Will Kirsty snap and tell Helen a few home truths? Will Pat's shotgun finally be brought into play? We can only hope ...

Also, will we ever find out who owns the other 60% of Grey Gables? Why is Adil AWOL (to use the other bit of OverArmour's title idea!)? Why aren't we hearing from Roy? Will GG ever re-open and will Emma get her Big Chance at last?

So many questions! Over to you.

If it is held in ambridge then they’ve really jumped the shark

Yes, welcome @FriendofDorothy - do please give Dorothy our love if you see her. I was sorry when she and Dan broke up ...

Am listening to the repeat of the Food Programme's Food and Farming Awards - and wondering if Helen listened yesterday. A Welsh ewe's milk cheese has just won an award.

Yes, absolutely: Downham having a vicar and a church makes that clear.

And even if it were to be in any of Alan's churches (he has the cure of about six, I think) it ought to be in the one where Rob is living, Penny Hassett, not Ambridge.

She is the vicar of a different parish and with her own church, too, so I can't think why anyone in Ambridge gives a flying, erm, fig about it this is what I don't understand. The whole storyline is just too contrived for words - if Alan has referred him out of the parish no-one needs to be any the wiser. Let him go off and get baptised - why does Brian or anyone else need to be involved? I wonder if there has ever been a case of an abusive husband trying to taunt his ex-wife via a church she doesn't even really attend (I know Peggy's a stalwart, but Helen and certainly Brian not so much)? It's just bizarre.

I still want to know how Rob knew that someone he had never met was going to baptise him on a date the person he'd never met had not yet agreed to. Unless the invitation he sent to people in Ambridge had "celebrant, time and place TBA" on it, of course.

(And I have a feeling it's unusual to do private baptisms, as opposed to doing them at the end of the Sunday morning service. But it could have changed since we had my lot dunked, and they in turn had theirs dunked, because that was more than ten years ago in all cases.)

Oh thanks @Asking - I must have just heard biking and made the rest up in my head. It would explain why she wants to leave him- cycling is so unsexy. Motorbiking, much less so.

Yes, exes involving the church in their abuse does happen IRL. That's the most plausible part of the SL IMO. We had a case 3 weeks ago where a man turned up during Mass looking for his kids and kicked off shouting and swearing when we wouldn't give him any information about them. He found his ex-wife/partner and physically attacked her. The Sunday before that we also had the police out over a sexual harassment incident. Abusers will use any tool they can, they rely on the fact that the church is open to anyone (literally, physically) and naturally inclined to be welcoming. Also, we get more than our fair share of people with psychological disorders.

That's really interesting @Fink - thank you for sharing.

Baptisms held as a separate event are more common than ones done during the main Sunday service, especially when the families aren't regular parishioners. But both are normal. It's just down to the preference of each parish/ priest.

Thank you.

I think an abuser using someone's church to get at them is more likely if the person they are trying to get at actually goes to church. If she doesn't (and Helen doesn't) it seems rather less useful to Rob as a gambit.

It was nice to have an episode about different stuff

I enjoyed that episode, but have slight dread about Tony's planned absence - I hope he isn't going to waste a bullet on Rob. (or is Pat's gun a shotgun? Pellets even more of a waste).

What would really be nice is if they then started doing together all the exciting things that Shula in her “Alistair’s so boring” phase wanted to do.

Shula and Helen could then exchange long phone calls about how totally right they both were to ditch their boring partners. I hadn’t noticed, but there’s a lot of similarities between Shula and Helen

So are we going to have a repeat of the Fallon / Emma / Tearoom scenario, where Jazzer gets excited about taking on the job he thinks his boss has left, but Hannah moves to the bungalow and so doesn’t actually need to leave Berrow?

@Fink
you are quite right about abusers and the use of churches/religion
are you aware of this organisation?
https://www.restored-uk.org/
who both support christian women experiencing abuse but also support churches to recognise and respond to abuse
sorry a bit off topic but info might be useful to someone

This. A signal to the working class to get some qualifications.

@CaptainMyCaptain that was me - I can’t remember exactly what it was that I thought was foreshadowing but I mentioned it a couple of threads back. I think that the SW (think they) have a long game in mind.

Another one here saying thanks to @Fink for the detail and insight into various aspects of faith and baptism, really useful for this thread and also generally really interesting

I’d just like to say in support of Denise’s husband that not all cyclists are unsexy or boring. My DH goes out every day in Lycra but he is adorable and I encourage him. I go myself when I am well.
I think it’s just the last straw for her.

Do you have evidence for that?
They are always part of the service here- across multiple parishes/vicars. They wont do private ones as it is about becoming part of the family of God.

@LillianGish it's a not uncommon tactic of abusive men to claim conversion and have a big baptism or something similar is they can claim to have changed, but also have everything centred on them once again.....

Oh sorry hadn't RTFT. Restored are a wonderful organisation!

I should think that it varies by area. We attend a very scenic church (relevant as we are in a city of many modern churches) and used to have many baptisms of children whose families never attended church. Our vicar moved the baptisms to Sunday afternoons and then introduced a policy that families must attend church for a certain number of weeks before he'd agree to baptise the child. I'd got heartily sick of seeing many friends or family members of the child being baptised standing in front of me and sniggering and mocking things during the service so I'm delighted that we don't have all of these baptisms during our weekly worship. When it's a baptism of a family known to church it's such a lovely event as it is a true welcoming to the church community and family of God.

In terms of hard stats, no, AFAIK that's not data that's officially collected.

It's more a question of the number of baptisms than the location, when deciding which to do. If they only have one baptism a month, then they can afford to have it during the main service. But the priest has to balance the needs of the congregation as a whole with the needs of the candidate for baptism, and most won't want to have three out of four Sunday services in a month taken up with baptisms.

Around where I work, the most popular solution is to have the baptisms done in a group one Saturday a month. If any of the families are practising members of the congregation and request to have it during the Sunday Mass, that would be granted. But hardly anyone requests it.

That's all for infant baptisms. For adults and older children it's usually a much bigger occasion, at least for us as Catholics and for the Anglicans I work with (high church). They are all done at the main Easter service (the Easter Vigil). If they need to be done outside of Easter, they're still often part of a big service. But exceptions are common - there's already some exceptional circumstances for why they're not being baptised at Easter, so individual circumstances will matter. If the person is Rob: controversial in the community, not a practising member of the parish, and possibly too ill to sit through a Sunday liturgy, then a separate baptism service would seem most likely. They're not private, no church service is private, but they're held separately from the main Sunday gathering.

How is Pip going to react to Hannah moving into the bungalow? I can’t imagine it will bear any resemblance to a normal person’s response.

I’ve assumed it would precipitate Stella’s moving in with The Only Lesbian On The Planet …