Archers thread #161: Kenton seems to be getting better, but the storylines aren’t. Discuss The Archers here.

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Well, here we are. I was strongly tempted to go for the dog's dinner, dog/human bullies etc suggestions for the title, but Mere asked if we could not have anything graphic in the thread title, so I've held back. In a couple of weeks when this thead is nearing its end the attack may all be a distant memory, anyway.

Goodness knows what's in store for us now. Kenton seems likely to have PTSD, not surprisingly. Surely we must soon find out why HARRY talks so. Unconvincingly. Alice! Hello. CHRIS. CHRIS. etc, and also whether he is (as many of us suspect) addicted to opiates and/or up to no good. Too much to hope why nobody in Ambridge horsey circles had ever heard of him until recent weeks.

Over to you!

Who is Selene/Celine Pocock? Who was Alice a bridesmaid for?
I thought people were usually bridesmaids for close family or close friends only.

I've noticed recently that even my texting app doesn't send SMS messages to most people anymore, it sends RCS messages. I don't know what they are, but they seem to use data and require the receiver to have their data switched on Are those like those damned iMessages? Sometimes they get re-sent as SMS if they don’t get through, but usually they just sit and sulk.

RCS - Rich Communications Services. No, not the same as iMessages because they haven’t got to iPhones yet - happens during 2024

Follow this thread but normally don’t post. As I walked through local town today I passed a shop with this T-Shirt in the window and thought of you all ….

You mean like “tested” as opposed to tear/teared? Yes, that seems to be the rule, doesn’t it “ed” rather than “‘d” whenever it would be difficult to say the “d” as part of the final sound. So smiled, laughed, etc, but rested, tested, seeded etc.

The 🔮 reminds us that "In Norse mythology, the goddess Freyja was associated with cats. Farmers sought protection for their crops by leaving pans of milk in their fields for Freya's special feline companions, the two grey cats who fought with her and pulled her chariot." (Wiki)

Tony should think on, lest Freyja's wrath descend upon Bridge Farm.

I'd quite like Hilda to move in with Jim. She might miraculously become nice and mellow. What has she ever actually done that's so awful, other than meow lots so we can hear there's a cat? She bit Tony, but I think I'd bite him too, if I were a cat.

Is it about to happen? Lots of placing of characters in and not in the Bull …

Phew!

Though why a supposedly responsible adult like Kenton is determined to cause so much extra trouble and worry is a mystery to me.

Oh dear.

a supposedly responsible adult like Kenton

I didn’t have you pegged as a new listener, @TottersBlanklyIntoBimboCore. Are you perhaps confusing Kenton with somebody else?

It’s not been a good week, has it?

She has bitten or savagely attacked a large number of people, not just Tony. On each occasion it has been unprovoked (and utterly implausible, because her behaviour was nothing like that of a cat, but she can't help having been badly written from the day she arrived).

She also caused Christine first to break her hip, by tripping her up, and then to move out into sheltered housing because Hilda was intolerable to her.

My feeling was that for enabling Kenton's bloody stupidity, Adam needed to be kicked from one end of Ambridge to the other; first of all he opened the flap to allow Kenton in behind the bar at all, which he had no business doing, and then, when the whisky had run out, instead of saying that it could wait, he allowed Kenton to faff about above his head putting a new bottle onto the optic rather than saying "show me how and I'll do that" as any half-way decent person would have.

Badly done, Adam.

Adam’s having a bad week, isn’t he? Fresh from letting Hilda into the dairy.

Glad Tony has some vestiges of conscience. Whether Peggy sees Hilda as a farm cat, which usually implies sleeping in a barn, I don’t know.

Utter bilge.

Also, the episode suffered from the same enormous plot hole as Dick Whittington does.

The Persians have never seen a cat before, and are amazed that it kills rats.
And now we find that Tony, a farmer for many decades, has only just realised that cats kill mice.

(or to be strictly accurate many cats do.)

(I have to admit that there is the odd cat that randomly attacks people (and other cats) - a neighbour's cat was like it, you could stroke him, then he'd suddenly attack, and there is a much-loved cat on a Litter Tray thread who is similar.)

Yuck at the two-tier class system of Adam and the Bridge Farm Archers, vs Clarrie, Susan, Tracy and Eddie's mate Interceptor.

The soothsayer has gone off with a large flagon of mead, and is in a huff in the corner.

Harry and Alice was ridiculous. His mother’s a massive red flag and I’d be running a mile.

why didn’t clarrie work out? I missed that bit.

glad Tony had a pang of conscience

how is the bull so busy? Aren’t Pat and Tony and Adam a bit mature for whiskey chasers. Kenton 🙄

why didn’t clarrie work out? I missed that bit.

She couldn't work the till.

glad Tony had a pang of conscience

What he also appeared to have was a pang of senility. He's been a farmer for decades and apparently has today realised that they have mice on the farm and that it would be good to control them. I've never known a farm that didn't have mice. You can stop them getting in certain areas, you can control the population so they don't overrun the place, and you can even get rid of them entirely for a while. But there's not a cat in hell's chance you can run a mouse-free farm, or be unaware of the issue until past retirement age. I wonder if being organic extends to what sort of rodent contol they would use (not officially as part of the organic status or anything, just a mindset).

On the plus side, change counting!

On the negative side, Pat speaking ominously about Clarrie and Susan learning a lesson. What lesson?! Watch out for stupid things your temporary boss might do when playing a practical joke on you?!

But couldn’t clarrie have helped with tidying up, collecting glasses, clearing tables, changing whiskey bottles, taking people their food orders etc? If all she couldn’t do was the till they could have sat Kenton next to it and got her to do the physical side whilst he processed the payments

two minutes into here is a piece about Battersea taking cats unsuitable for domestic rehoming and turning them into working cats. Also features Larry at no 10 and the beautiful Bolt the Huddersfield Station Cat (who I have actually met and cuddled).

I read an excellent and ridiculous novel recently where Larry the cat and his equivalent at the White House were genetically modified, intelligent, and fully capable of communicating with people through a keyboard. Their housemates knew none of it; they were spies for villains. So maybe Hilda has a second career in her after all.

And so Freyja's avatar Hilde establishes herself at Bridge Farm, the better to observe the young Antichrist as he grows to maturity

She watches and waits, prepared to strike...

Also features Larry at no 10 and the beautiful Bolt the Huddersfield Station Cat (who I have actually met and cuddled)

I just watched that, and Bolt looked lovely, although quite, er, enthusiastic in his grappling 😂

There used to be a majestic cat at Barbican tube station who liked to sit on top of the barriers. You could give him/her (not sure I ever knew his/her sex) a quick stroke as you put your ticket through. Pre-contactless days.

And who could forget the legendary cat of the Scala cinema who prowled the arena waiting to leap up on unsuspecting laps just at the scariest moments in the Friday-night slasher movie specials…..ah, happy times!

I'd missed this thread. So relieved that Hilda has a reprieve, the idea of handing her over to some dodgy pal of Eddie's was horrifying.

I'm interested that Harry's ma stepped in so very firmly once she learned of Alice's history of addiction - it makes me more inclined to think he's an addict himself, though like the poster upthread, I did briefly hope it was because Brian is his secret dad.