Archers thread #167: Welcome to Ambridge, the world capital of loose ends! 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'd like The Archers to be wall to wall election conversations for the next month, 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.)

Over to you!

on Joy - I thought there were issues with her and Helen at the start because she was a bit of a nightmare neighbour with the hot tub etc?

Until Helen and Lee started using it.

It's a pity a religious-minded church-visiting tourist didn't rock up in St Stephen's during that ceremony and challenge Alan and start a discussion on the rise and fall of the concept of Limbo, with a side-order of Abraham's Bosom.

Since they seem to have given up on making Ambridge seem like a real place or its inhabitants like real people, anything goes.

I’m not sure including someone in prayer is co-opting them into religion but I do think the planned memorial service was outrageous. I’m not sure if Fallon is atheist but I understand her annoyance. I just thought she overreacted a bit.

I was forced to attend church every Sunday when I was a child and absolutely hated it. My dad was a church minister. I didn’t (and don’t) believe in any form of religion and neither did my brother. Our dad was deeply alarmed and prayed for our souls loudly at home. I remember the pair of us chuckling when we heard him. To this day his text messages to us include a “I’m praying for you” or similar. It doesn’t bother us. Oddly enough my brother’s wife is a Christian and attends church fairly often. They seem very happily married!

PS, I wasn't really concentrating yesterday and I don't want to listen again, but did Joy offer to do Mick's laundry?

Yes, weekly.

I can't decide what I think of Mick. Didn't like his eagerness to lie for Alistair and Denise.

They are def teasing us re Rochelle

I was brought up in a house with no religion and belief was very much open to us but I have never been able to believe. The religions that surround belief are also different to me than the idea of belief. I do find I am unusual amongst those with no belief because it is not tied to an upbringing with belief- although much more common amongst younger people

just last week someone said they would keep me in their prayers. That doesn’t bother me as it is more a ‘thinking of you’ sentiment. However, if someone said they were going to go to a church to pray about something and that they would pray on my behalf that would annoy me. And that is effectively what Harrison did - intentionally or not. As we don’t know if Fallon is religious though it is hard to tell - if she is religious then I would imagine it would be even more annoying to have had prayers made on my behalf to a god I do believe in

If mick is going to move in with Joy I wish they would just hurry up and do it

i asked upthread if he drives around in his camper van and parks it outside joys when he visits etc? I am a non driving city dweller so unsure!!

Yes indeed!

He seems to park it in the Car Park at Grey Gables but could drive it places to. I don't know where he empties his toilet though. I wouldn't imagine Oliver would appreciate him traipsing through GG to empty it in the guest toilets. He would also have to empty the waste water container for grey water from washing etc.

To those not familiar with Motor Homes/Camper vans, it will be a cassette toilet - the cassette is accessible from the outside and is just a plastic box on wheels not a hideous sight at all but not what guests would be expecting. He'd have to be careful about splashing if emptying it into a normal lavatory, campsites will have a special facility for emptying with a hose for rinsing it out.

Dear God in Heaven.

More of a pious ejaculation than a prayer, but really - fine if she offered to let him come over and use her washing machine, a generous offer from a kind friend, but to actually do it?

I felt sorry for Harrison too, to be honest he is very very upset about the loss of what could have been a child, which sounds like he wanted all along but kept that to hisself because he didnt want to upset Fallon.

One of the problems is his refusal to acknowledge that, in biological terms, actually it probably never could have been a child. A hefty proportion of miscarriages happen because the pregnancy was never viable, and in this case it is also likely that it would never have implanted because of the coil. There is also the non-biological factor that it couldn't have become a child because the pregnancy would probably have been terminated.

But Harrison insists on somewhat romanticised view of a little baby cruelly deprived of life by Alice's wickedness, so he is mourning and praying for what was, essentially, a myth. The bigger picture of course is that he is mourning for the fact that he probably won't ever have children, and actually that is what Alan should be focusing on rather than this one non-child.

I thought Fallon behaved pretty badly last night. If my DH read my text messages and erupted because I'd had a private prayer session with my vicar, I'd be very unimpressed. I get the point about the rubbish prayer but that's not on Harrison, it's Alan bumbling about, as per.

I still think Harrison's an idiot but I didn't think he was in the wrong last night.

Accidental OD for Alice when she mixes booze and pills leading to George's confession?

The only thing keeping me listening is the Rochelle denouement!

I think Fallon is at the end of her tether so overreacted. Harrison should have told her - he goes on about wanting to talk but he won’t actually do it. There’s nothing stopping him saying that he’s grieving the fact he won’t be a father and that he understands her position so is trying not to involve her in his coping. But he’s too scared to say it

and for Fallon she must feel totally unsupported by him over her near fatal accident and the fact he made it all about his feelings and the miscarriage. He has consistently bulldozed her feelings - his anger that he threw at Alice which told the village about the miscarriage, his ranting over Alice, etc. I can see why Fallon said she didn’t want to talk about it with him because he wasn’t talking about his feelings but ranting about others and she certainly didn’t need to be dealing with that ontop of everything else.

I am a bit sick of the SL now though

The scriptwriters are pretty ignorant about religion which is why we get all this mangled nonsense around any religious storylines. Every so often, though, they like to show off about how much they know about literature so we get a really unlikely little bit of lit crit shoehorned into the plot.

Am also thinking about returning to my recent pause on listening. It’s all just too annoying again.

So his quiet evening of prayer for a baby she doesn’t think actually ever existed underlines the seismic gap in their relationship and beliefs and illustrates how utterly incompatible they have become on a fundamental level - I think this is the crux of it. Harrison's determination to be baptised and religious conversion was already a challenge for Fallon, but she managed to put it to one side and think of it as hobby (like cricket). Now she's seeing it as a fundamental part of who he is - ie he's no longer the man she married and this is coupled with a u-turn on the children issue. The drunken nightclub rapping incident (which mercifully we were spared) was clearly included to signal what is now an unbridgeable divide between them. I don't think Fallon and Harrison can come back from this.
I'm also a bit worried about Alice being prescribed strong tranquillisers with a warning not to mix them with drink shortly before her visit to The Stables (which keeps being signposted) where she will learn she has been replaced.
I'm not even slightly interested in Joy and Mick and would actually be quite happy never to know the truth about Rochelle. The truth is unlikely to live up to any of our own speculation and will be poorly formulated with lots of holes in it. Far better to for it to hover eternally just out of reach lending an air of mystery to Joy.

I fear the Rochelle SL is going to be a big disappointment as they have left it too long and the speculation will have been more interesting

I agree with whoever it was that said it's the fishing trip from Gavin and Stacey all over again.

He didn’t, did he? I thought it was a text on his phone.

She’s unreasonable in not allowing him any outlet for his feelings. She is disrespecting him just as she thinks he is disrespecting her.

That he meant to keep it secret from her really doesn't make it better; if anything, it makes it worse. She only has herself to blame for that. She’s made it impossible for him to speak to her about it

She hasn’t made it impossible - after Alan’s dropping him in it at the cafe she asked him to explain himself and he chose to run away. Every time they have had an argument she has said her feelings and he has had opportunity to response but he chooses not to. Probably because he knows he’s being irrational.

and he never acknowledges her feelings.

when she talked about being controlled I think she was realising that her emotional needs are not met in the marriage and that’s part of her frustration with him

its a bit of a shitty marriage when you look at it before the miscarriage. He does what he wants but she discusses everything with him and accepts his ‘no’. I wouldn’t want to be tied to him by kids because she will be the one constantly having to compromise

I think Harrison has served his purpose, whatever it was, and can now be disposed of. Perhaps Alan could refer him to the bishop, who could pass him on to a Catholic bishop who could send him to "serve" in a small Catholic community far, far away. Tristan da Cunha?

If Fallon was reading texts on Harrison's phone (I don't doubt people who said this, I really wasn't concentrating yesterday) then she as more at fault than him. Or is my twitchiness around respecting partner's boundaries and privacy excessive? And around keeping off cops' communication devices.

do cops use personal phones for cop business?

I would imagine he has messages that pop up so she could already see ‘Alan:here is the text of the service’ and clicked because of that but wouldn’t have if it were his boss. I also assume it was a WhatsApp or something as texting that would be odd. An email would have made more sense but wouldn’t have popped up I suppose

The atmosphere of a church is different from that of a vicarage. I see no reason why Alan and Harrison shouldn’t have been alone together in the church. In the evening when there are unlikely to be visitors.

Perhaps he needs a cross-stitch sampler to hang in the loo: "Thou God seest me". Reminds me of a club hut with a sign in the toilet cubicle “For your security, CCTV has been installed”

And that is the crux of it all: Harrison wants to wave Fallon's private medical affairs round his head like a banner and proclaim his grief and anger about them to the world; Fallon would prefer them to remain Her. Private. Medical. Affairs. These two desires are clearly not compatible. Harrison talking about the effect on him in private to a person who *should’ be expected to keep it confidential seems a reasonable compromise. But Fallon is not open to compromise.

One of my grandmothers was a divvil for reading other people's private correspondence, which triggered several EPIC family rows, and it has left me very hands-off anything not specifically directed to me. Also quite gossip-averse.