Archers thread #158: Te Rum? You numpty, numpty, Tom! Empty tearoom follows. Christmas coming, farmers’ stand up, will it make us LOL? No! 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 think Tom Archer is a great businessman, 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 @LillianGish for the title idea, which may plant an earworm if my scansion just about holds up. @BeatriceBatchelor wanted 'plebby coffee' inserted in reference to my Bolivian coffee anecdote on the last thread, so I'll mention it here instead. Here's hoping Fallon and Emma decamp to the charging station or Grey Gables, or both, to run the type of coffee shop/tearoom people actually enjoy spending time in. Tom's cauliflower eclairs and kale criossants approach sounds more likely to drive the casual trade away from the farm shop and cheese window as well as the Google Translate-named Te Rum.

Feeling very uninspired by TA at the moment, so I have nothing more to say for now. Over to you!

Surely the Grundies have more chance of winning the lottery than getting an almshouse?!? Nice idea but I don’t think there are enough of them to be a realistic option. The SWs have been Googling again…

IRL E and C would end up in a not-very-nice flat in Felpersham or even Borchester rather than a Cotswold Cottage almshouse in leafy Penny Hassett…

May be they will end up in the Lodge?

I'm not saying they would get one just making the point they aren't workhouse-like but communities of cottages . The ones I know are in a market town (women only) and a city in the North and quite attractive.

Remind me, who owned Grange Farm before Oliver? Did the Grundys just have a nameless landlord for most of the programme’s history?

Gosh, if anyone in whose business I'd invested, spoke to me like Shula spoke to Lilian, I'd be taking my ball (and my money) and going home! She's utterly unbearable...

Thankfully Shula is only staying for a week or two before she returns to oppressing the innocent poor of Newcastle.

Didn’t Lillian say she was using her own money to buy the land?

Not all almshouses are quaint cottages. Basingstoke has some from the 1920s. Though that is quite quaint after it's '60s rebuild.... (there are also some older ones at the Top of Town.)

Yes, so Shula can't veto that, but she could veto ot being used for the Stables, I guess.

Lillian’s idea is ridiculous but it also seems removed from the stables. Like a corner shop deciding to open a megastore

She could use the land to build herself a house and move out from Justin's clutches.

Although clearly what will actually happen is more of the Dick Darstardly moustache twiddling and Lilian Penelope Pitstop Bellamy coming up with an ingenious scheme of her own to counter his underhand tactics. And they'll both still be playing happy families when the dust settles at the end. I can't wait.

Shula was very, erm, forceful. Still, she’s practically Wonder Woman managing to drive ‘all the way from Sunderland’. I’m surprised she didn’t get a nosebleed.

I also think Eddie is up to something. Quelle Suprise.

No, he has that irritating wheedling tone to his voice when he's trying to play someone.

There are some lovely almshouses in Sunderland. Quite possibly Shula passes them on her way to work. Maybe Eddie and Clarrie could move into one if those if there was space available. It would make for an interesting Ambridge "Up North" Extra...

@EmmasBirthdayEarrings @Passepartoute I thought he was angling for inclusion of Will and Ed into Oliver's will...

Oh I know, I’ve lived near a couple. They’re beautiful and I’m angling to live in one when I’m older!

But this is the Grundys we’re talking about, so it will inevitably go wrong.

Good for you! Sounds like your employer would be mad not to keep you on. How I would love to hear somebody do something similar on TA. I always felt they missed a trick by not having Susan go back into education decades ago. She could have done a computer course or similar and ended up running Grey Gables.

Going off at a tangent now I've mentioned Susan - it never seemed realistic that Susan was appointed as subpostmaster in spite of having a criminal record. I could have swallowed it if we'd heard some mention of Susan having to declare it and after prolonged deliberation the Post Office had decided it wasn't relevant. The fact that it was (IIRC) simply not mentioned did rather raise the suspicion that the SWs had forgotten all about it, or didn't grasp quite what sort of organisation the Post Office is. This has all come back to me because a couple of weeks ago I was listening to the excellent BBC podcast about the Horizon scandal where subpostmasters up and down the country were accused of theft when the computing system went wrong and their accounts wouldn't balance. Many were prosecuted, some went to prison, a few committed suicide, most of them lost their livelihoods and their good names. It was one of the worst scandals I can remember hearing about in recent times. I think on balance I'm very glad the BBC has simply ignored all of that for Archers purposes. But it has made me think the Post Office would have taken an absolutely draconian line on approving Susan, even though her conviction had nothing to do with theft or dishonesty. The double standards from the PO appear to have been jawdropping.

There are some lovely almshouses in Sunderland…Maybe Eddie and Clarrie could move into one if those if there was space available.

And be that far from their unowned ancestral lands?!

@BrightYellowDaffodil Very fair point! 🤣

There is an argument for having English and Maths GCSE as it’s the basic requirements for quite a few other qualifications - my grandmother went back and sat her O Levels in both in order to get a job in the Civil Service. But Emma needs some sort of career plan otherwise she’ll just faff about and then complain that no one invited her to be CEO of a FTSE 100 company.

Re the Post Office scandal - well, quite, Gasp. And it’s still on-going; the official enquiry hasn’t finished, I don’t think, and is throwing up jaw-dropping evidence. People haven’t been properly compensated either, having lost everything.

The chances of Susan being allowed to be a postmistress with an existing criminal conviction do indeed seem remote.

Asking will have chapter and verse, but when The Archers began in 1951 most of the farmland in the area belonged to the local squire (Lawson-Hope?). I believe there were various sales over the years, including huge chunks of land being sold off to Ralph Bellamy, Lilian's second husband, who ran it as an Estate comprising various tenanted farms with a land agent running the Estate Office in the village - that was Shula at one point - was Susan the secretary? Did Peggy work there too? Can't remember now.

Ralph and Lilian eventually moved to Guernsey for tax reasons, but he continued to own the land. When he died the Estate was sold off and all/most was bought by Guy Pemberton, who then married Caroline Bone (later Oliver's wife). When Guy died, the land passed to his son Simon who had affairs with Shula and Debbie, assaulted both of them and got off with a slap on the wrist.

After that, he sold up and Borchester Land arrived. Consortium of investors? Brian has been involved in that from the start. Martin Gibson, Justin and Annabel (surname escapes me) are other directors we've come to know and loathe.

I think it was back in the 1950s that Dan Archer got the opportunity to buy Brookfield and did so, to the great fortune of his descendants. Bridge Farm remained as a tenant farm until much more recently but Pat and Tony did eventually get the money together to buy it. Grange Farm was always a tenant farm until the Grundys defaulted on the rent. After they were evicted it was sold off and Oliver bought it as a hobby farm for his retirement.

Lots of almhouses in London. Many of them date back to the Middle Ages when I believe rich people hoped leaving money for some charitable purpose would help them through the eye of the needle. Fink will know the theology of this. The livery companies of the City of London administer many of them, having been left that responsibility by members hundreds of years ago. A good many of them have been rebuilt in recent years - (a) so that the accommodation can be improved and (b) so that valuable plots of land in the centre of London can be sold for a small fortune and the proceeds reinvested in building new accommodation, and possibly more of it, in leafier areas a lot further out.

This one is not a million miles from where we live and won an award from RIBA recently for a new building. https://mordencollege.org.uk/ It looks absolutely lovely.

Yes. Amazingly enough, it appears to have been nobody's fault, or at least none of the directors who have testified so far have admitted any responsibility for this incredible cock up and cover up. Who could have predicted that?

There are people on my apprenticeship who don't have GCSE maths and English.

They are able to do a functional qualification instead which is far less time consuming.

After all these years in hospitality I find it hard to believe Emma has any difficulty with basic arithmetic, given the amount of cash handling she must have done, plus ordering supplies, divvying out tips, and so on. Even now so many people pay by contactless, there must be some basic numeracy required. Would that be the kind of thing covered by functional maths?