Archers thread #195: Run, Amber, run! 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 19 is an ideal age to have a baby with a convict, 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 https://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.)

Emma spoke sense to George and Amber tonight. Goodness only knows where this storyline is going. I can't see George being Father of the Year. Oh dear.

Over to you!

A friend of a friend divorced her farmer husband but didn't take her share of the marital home in order to make sure her children would inherit the farm as a whole. I don't know the details because it was a long time ago and I didn't really know her myself.

I think they should all sit down and discuss the inheritance side of the farm and maybe get Stella to sign a pre-nup of sorts. Im sure Pip and Stella won't have any children (because you can't improve on fat Rosie),.
I think it would be funny if Emma was to become pregnant now, That would be a bit of a shake up.
Glad Carrie said no to Susan . Maybe Helen might not want Clarrie back.
Also if they have trouble again would Carrie lose her job again, and why is Clarrie doing two jobs and child care. No wonder her Arthuritis is playing up.

I lived on a dairy farm where the parents left the farm between their son and daughter. Daughter wasn't interested but the son was trying to make enough to pay off his sister. A lot of inter-sibling resentment would have been saved if the parents had just left the place to the son and got the tough decision done with in one fell swoop.

I suspect they'll continue the ghastly complicated division of the spoils started by Phil and leave all the "special" shares to Pip and some very un-special ones to Josh and Ben. Then if Kenton, Shula and Elizabeth do likewise (they only have un-special shares), the place will end up being owned by Pip, Josh, Ben, Meriel, Daniel, Freddie and Lily in unequal shares, resulting in much pointless internecine strife.

I don’t think they are going to rehabilitate George. He behaves reasonably ok when things are going his way but the mask slips very easily and I’m sure we’ll continue to see that. He doesn’t really have the love of a good woman anyway. As Amber’s mother noted, she is trying to convince herself she loves George and that pretence will all come crashing down soon enough.

My first thought during yesterday’s episode was that he engineered the cow’s escaping so that he could prove himself indispensable to Esme. Would Josh not have noticed if he damaged the gate?

It didn't occur to me that George might have let the cows out. I mean, he's an idiot but surely not so stupid as to do that (if only for fear of being caught). Also, given that Esme already seems very appreciative of his work, why would he?

Eastie77Returns
My first thought during yesterday’s episode was that he engineered the cow’s escaping so that he could prove himself indispensable to Esme. Would Josh not have noticed if he damaged the gate?

Mine too.

If they were in their winter housing, which I am told on another thread was what George said they had got out of, wouldn't that be a barn of some sort, or else what's the point? I don't see how Josh could avoid noticing it if he had damaged a barn door.

Because he is currently employed on a trial basis and he wanted to create a crisis to show Esme why she needs him permanently? He was very understanding towards Josh and the “oh mistakes happen” line also made me very suspicious. Josh has presumably been operating the scraper for years and yet he bumped a hinge, bringing down a gate and didn’t notice? And it all worked out quite well for George in the end with Amber asking him to take on the milking.

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if he starts undermining her confidence and other little things mysteriously go wrong on the farm so he can ‘help out’ more.

I wasn't paying close attention, but did Josh knock the gate off one hinge, which made it possible for the cows to knock it off the other one and get out? I could see why you wouldn't notice one hinge, especially if it was getting dark.

Poor, poor Clarrie. I know some people love working and go on far beyond state retirement age out of choice, but I don't get any great sense that she is one of them. I can't believe the Grundys have amassed any savings. I wonder what sort of state pension she and Eddie are getting. Would Bridge Farm have had to pay into a private pension for Clarrie in recent years? Eddie might have a tiny pension entitlement from the market too. In the real world, they might be entitled to Pension Credit. In Ambridge, however, nobody seems to know about benefits.

That is also my take on it.

George is portrayed as having a genuine care for animals and a good stockman. So I can’t see him risking the welfare of the cows.

george seems to have phases of good and bad (bipolar?)

maybe it could be a 'mental health managed in the community' story?

No. There's never been any inkling of bipolar. Some people are simply just manipulative bastards without having to use mental health issues as an excuse.

He was caring towards Bartelby and his dog.
Humans are more complex creatures, sadly.

And mine. George wants to keep his job so he can contribute to the provision for his little family. I thought it was Josh, trying to throw the blame on George, until he apologised.

Barns for overwintering cattle don't have barn doors as such, but ordinary five bar gates. It's quite possible to lift it off the bottom hinge by accident and not notice.

In this area of Europe, it's really common to see long, extremely narrow fields (sometimes as narrow as 10m or so!): it looks very oddly stripy from a plane. I'm told this is due to how inheritance used to work: the land had to be divided among all children (not just males), so the fields became smaller and smaller (and ridiculously narrow), and the farms unable to support families. I'm told that this was a big contributor to people emigrating to North America etc. Inheritance here still has "mandatory shares" that you can't disinherit your kids from, but I'm not sure how those apply to land now. For the sustainability of farms as businesses, it was a problem.

Strip-farming in the middle ages here, lasted longer in France I believe. It was intended to make sure that one person or family didn't get the whole of a good bit of land: they would have one strip here and another strip there and a third somewhere else, distributed over the village land as a whole. "The scattered nature of family holdings ensured that families each received a ration of both good and poor land and minimised risk." If instead of one or two of the children inheriting you subdivide the family land between all the surviving children, each one gets less in each generation until the peasants starve or you have the French Revolution, whichever shall be the sooner.

In this country we had the Enclosures instead, and strip-farming gradually vanished because ordinary people stopped being allowed to have any land. So everyone starved just the same, or went and died in the manufacturies in towns.

Was it established why George happened to be at the farm at 4am (Esme said she was woken up by the cows at 3am and he commented she’d been managing alone for an hour)? I’m not sure if that is the time he is meant to start work.

He may care for animals but he’s also the type of person who could rationalise doing something stupid and reckless as part of the greater good (holding down a job to provide for the baybee).

He was getting up at some ungodly hour to get to work for the morning milking on his first day, and Will and Amber got up at the same time, in one case to make him a bacon sarnie and in the other just to say "goodbye" (I think). So yes, four sounds right.

He starts the early milking then. It's dictated by the timing of the milk tanker collecting, perhaps.

I don't see George as quite that careless of animal welfare, or indeed quite that stupid. Yes, he's pretty stupid by any standards, but if serious harm had come to the cows then the farm would have been affected and he might have been out of a job. I suspect that what happened was an accident, possibly caused by Josh ... who I think pretty well admitted as much.

At least it enabled Esme to tell Josh to back off!

I just assume it was George. You say he’s careful of animal welfare but didn’t he bring some illicit pork products into Neil’s workplace? He probably knocked it a bit and hoped for the best.

I don’t know how much risk he’d expect from the cows being outside for one night or a couple of hours? It’s not like they’d be wandering the countryside, presumably they were in a yard of some kind or they wouldn’t have been able to get them back in so quickly.

And it’s interesting that he quickly found and fixed the broken gate without Josh or Esme actually seeing the damage.

I guess that when the cows got out it was fairly obvious, in the sense that the gate was probably hanging off.

I like the way George's character is being written - he seems to really want to change and a lot of the time it seems that he's really grown up, he dealt with Josh's needling for a start. Every now and then he reverts back to his old ways but that's being human, I guess.

I think Esme is going to fall for George.

I wonder then if he goes for it while also with Amber?