I thought I'd start a separate topic as we'd drifted off from Sir Terry via Jack Woolley.

Jem, I started on how Shula and Kenton got their names.

It was pathetic! They had these children's building blocks with letters on the side. (Could they have been Scrabble tiles? I think not because that would have introduced a dangerously intellectual motif.) Anyway, when Jill knew she was expecting twins they threw them up in the air (the blocks) to see how they landed and put together a couple of names that way. Kenton seems to have taken over the role of 'lovable rogue' previously held by Nelson Gabriel.

I suppose some people might see that method as incredibly inventive.

I think I'll look on the website to see if it's how I remember it.

Loved Clarrie worried about her puff pastry bites this morning. Mostly v. boring, though, with a very low-key burglary. I wonder Shula didn't dwell at length on the sentimental value of her jewellery in that way they have of pretending it's not the money that counts whilst making sure they've got plenty. What a turn-up, that naughty Jack leaving the tap on in the downstairs loo! Good thing Parasite Tom, oops, sorry 'Entrepreneur' Tom, fresh from yelling at his 'staff' for disloyalty,(disloyalty to sausages?) was on hand to mop up and apply fan heaters so Peggy could dash back upstairs to help whoever was there to 'settle' Jack. I hope in future he'll forget he's turned on the chip-pan, like my father did once. Not that Peggy allows fry-ups.

I preferred the previous 'Jek', the alcoholic pub landlord.

Sheila

We've been building up to "the burglary" for a while now with the introduction of the young man Alastair is befriending at his GA classes. At least it gets Shula off the tedious subject of religion now she's got something else to have a moan at!

Kenton is clearly going to do some mad derring-do stuff and get beaten up, and then Shula will blame Alistair for not seeing thru' Ryan, and Alistair will go back to gambling, and she'll divorce him and try to have an affair with Alan...

Emma

Yay!

I really like the Archers but only ever catch snatches. Then I manage to catch a bit of the omnibus and IT'S ALWAYS THE BLOODY BIT I'VE HEARD. Honestly. It's downright spooky (and annoying).
Does anyone else have this? Happens with Women's Hour and the omnibus too.

Murphy's Law, innit, Caroline. And this week is the 60th anniversary of it, apparently. Or something.

I've missed a lot of episodes recently - well, not missed in the sense of regretted not seeing. But they always have a very genteel dose of whatever social ills are current don't they? As with Jack's inconvenient Altzheimers, I can't take Alstair's gambling addiction seriously. They've not exactly hit rock bottom, and Alistair's not only reformed but dishing out advice, it seems. How much did he lose, anyway, does anybody know?

Caroline, I'm surprised you manage to miss it when it seems to be on all the time. I keep de-tuning the radio but it goes back.

Sheila

Alistair lost something like £80,000, and got blackmailed into doping a racehorse before he confessed all. They had to remortgage the stables to pay off the debt - which was to Matt CRawford, needless to say!

Emma

<Added>

I realise that it's very, very sad that I know all this. My only excuse is that I got addicted to The Archers when I was eleven, and was in bed with flu for a fortnight. We didn't have a TV, and I don't think I knew where anything was except R3 and R4 on the dial. (I remember looking in the Radio Times at R1 and R2 - which only divided for some of the day - and wondering what these programmes were that just said a name - like Tony Blackburn - and didn't tell you what was in them. And I didn't try to find out because, well, they didn't tell you what was in them...)

It must be devastating to have to re-mortgage one's stables. I think they must be Shula's stables, though, so perhaps not quite so bad.

Anyway, I seem to recall he paid the price, having tp put up with passes for wifely reproof in The Archers: deep sighs and 'Oh, Alistair! How could you!' She may even have burst into tears.

That'll teach him.

I'd been assuming that Shula still had that office job with the solicitors - Rodway and Watsons. Maybe she inherited the stables from Auntie Christine, as she was whinging recently about the recession and people having to cut down on horse-riding. That set my heart pounding with sympathy, too. Despite their expensive educations and posh accents nobody in The Archers ever seems to dream of going to University, or even reading a book for that matter. (Will Alice break the mould? Hasn't she deferred so she can go to South Africa for a while? Or is she travelling back at weekends to dally with the pig wrangler?)

Sheila

She bought the business from Christine, and they had a horse-slasher, which they never actually proved was Susan's ne'er-do-well brother.

Alice is at university, and Christopher is feeling insecure. But, yes, no one ever reads a book - I guess it doesn't make good radio. They don't watch tv, either. The panto is just about the sum total of Ambridge's cultural life.

In China, people are so desperate to get away from their peasant heritage they have laws to make living in cities illegal without a permit.

Arguably, conditions here are not that harsh, but I was made aware in days of marking national exams in English Language how disadvantaged country children are in terms of stimulation.

I wouldn't mind the characters not reading, or not having cultural activities - I don't count Jill's annual trips to the ballet - if only they'd admit to feeling bored or isolated occasionally. No, it's all 'Oh,I wonder whose jam will win first prize in the produce show this year!' It's not just a case of 'after they've seen Paree' - it's human nature to reject a milieu where you have to work outdoors, knee deep in mud and where topics of conversation are restricted to pulling carrots, sorting out slurrey, milking cows, stuffing the sausages or potting yoghurts.

And I wouldn't mind it but these stunted humans are held up as models of good sense, with the social set up as 'natural'. You don't have to be as media-effects savvy as I am to see the join.

Sheila

if only they'd admit to feeling bored or isolated occasionally

Will's girlfriend Nic got so desperate with being stuck out in his cottage with her two and his that she ended up slapping spoilt brat George, and the whole family exploded in anti-child-abuse rage (which I found rather unlikely - can't see Eddie being that fussed, can you?) and she left him.

And Siobhan being bored ended in her having an affair with Brian and look where that got them.

But I agree about the yoghurt.

Emma

how disadvantaged country children are in terms of stimulation

I do think it's true. You can say all you like about the education of the hedgerows and the freedom to roam, but what about all those theatres, and oddities, and people with different lives?

In China, people are so desperate to get away from their peasant heritage they have laws to make living in cities illegal without a permit.

I remember being fascinated when about twenty years ago we were in France, and I found an IKEA catalogue. French IKEA was all sleek black ash and steel and stripes, while UK IKEA was full of rustic pine and antiqued brass and toile de joiue [sp?]. And shortly afterwards I discovered that the way urbanisation is measured in history is the point at which the population of a state changes from the majority being rural to the majority being urban. In the UK that point was 1850. In France it was 1950. So rustic fashion in the UK is beyond living memory, and therefore charming. Rustic fashion in France is (in IKEA's terms c. 1989) your parent's fashion, to be got away from as much as possible. (Of course now, in the UK, the loft-living thing means that modernism is back in style, and I can admit to my passion for 1950s design, born of childhood trips to the Festival Hall...)

Emma

I hadn't hought of it like that. Maybe in a hundred years time the urban Chinese will be hankering to go back to the land.

It's Toile de Jouie. It was mentioned in last night's episode of Larkrise to Candleford, when those dress-making sisters left swatches of material for the mystery woman staying at the hotel.

That's another rural idyll fantasy story.

Sheila

Oh. Is it only in China? I always assumed it was illegal for the people of Ambridge to go into Borchesterford or whatever it's called without a permit, in case they strayed into a shop that sold something other than the Daily Mail.

In the days when Sundays were for lolling and I followed the Archers, there was Kate who ran off to Ahfrica and came back with a baby and a blek husband. Does she not feature anymore?