Natasha has been audibly tip-tapping here, there and everywhere this month: sashaying into the tearoom to insist on Fallon and Emma playing crap music, sticking her shiny Louboutin-clad foot in it with Helen Archer. (OK, her boots are probably from Felpersham Russell & Bromley, but it’s only a matter of time before the upgrade, given her lust for world domination). She has also been sporting her waterproof mascara at Denise’s Zumba class, erecting foully tasteless arches of artificial wisteria around the tearoom door, and reminding hapless hack Rebecca Price that she is paid to provide advertorial, not to uphold a free press and local democracy by actually doing some reporting. (Such is the sad decline of the Borsetshire Echo – not that, unfortunately, Ms Price is a great advertisement for the ethics of journalism.)
Grey Gables, finally edging towards its soft reopening, feels as if it might need a name change: those gables don’t feel very grey any more, what with the super-luxury spa, the ballroom with its retractable stage and the soon-to-be-opened bistro. Lily Pargetter is about to do a work experience placement there; you might more accurately call it an industrial espionage placement, owing to the drain of staff from her family pile of Lower Loxley towards those newly Gleaming Gables.
The Mystery Buyer of Oliver Sterling’s 10 acres, sold to meet the cost of the renovations of the above, turns out to be Evil Rob Titchener, the Zombie Sequel – by which I mean Rob’s only slightly less evil brother, Miles, who, acting on the dying wishes of his sibling, bought the land in trust for Rob and Helen’s son, Jack. This dastardly and divisive move ensures a future of splendid rifts, breaches, fissures etc between Jack and his overlooked half-brother, Henry – not that Henry seems to mind. For now.
Academic Archers, the annual conference of boffins presenting papers on the remarkable 70-year-old social experiment that is Ambridge, this spring offers a session splendidly titled: “It’s a ferret Ferris wheel!: depictions of human-animal interactions and animal welfare in the Archers.” Material for this study abounded this month: the newest inhabitant of the Laurels care home has been found wandering the corridors, glaring balefully at fellow residents, and stealing food from their rooms. Not Peggy Woolley, whose steel trap of a mind is functioning quite nicely thank you, but her vicious cat, Hilda, who has been summarily kicked out, and touted round various Archers and Aldridges in search of new quarters. She quite likes Brian Aldridge, it seems – but his suspected resurgent heart trouble turns out to be a severe cat allergy. Peggy’s son Tony is the reluctant beneficiary, but will he survive with all his fingers intact? Only time will tell. For the moment, he is already the walking wounded.