The agony of Alistair Lloyd, veterinary surgeon and secret admirer of Denise, veterinary nurse, is over. Sort of. After months of painful attraction, after a nearly-kiss at Christmas, after hours of workplace longing and frustrated desire over the scalpels, swabs and sutures, it’s out there. He has told her he loves her. She has reciprocated. They have kissed (no sound effects, thankfully – a merciful edit). They have kissed again, and again – passionate bouts of snogging in the medical supplies cupboard, almost discovered by Denise’s son and colleague Paul, the practice’s other vet nurse. The course of this true love is not going to run smooth. As it is, Alistair has already threatened twice to leave the practice – once when he thought his adoration was unrequited, and once when he mistakenly understood Denise to say that she wanted to work on her marriage. For yes, Denise is still married (separate lives!) to Paul’s dad, currently in the Caribbean tending to his dying mother. Paul keeps bleating on about his father’s needing Denise, and why doesn’t she go out there to join him. For a sensitive soul, he hasn’t noticed the obvious. For the moment. I foresee storms.
The Crabbe, or is it Goyle of Ambridge, George Grundy, may have passed through his full-on Andrew Tate phase, but has not yet, it seems, shed the signs of being a malicious little so-and-so. This month he’s been full of spite to Hannah, his erstwhile boss at the pig unit, whose chief crime against him was being a woman. He’s also been wonderfully ungracious about the fact that his uncle, farrier Chris Carter, joint chief contender for hottest man in Ambridge along with Swedish vet Jakob, overshadowed him in some tedious TikTok he was making about the ancient Grundy family pony, Bartleby. He’s also got himself banned from the Bull, after a grim little incident in which he was outrageously rude to Jolene. Emma, George’s mum, has resigned as a bartender in protest at her son’s treatment. That doesn’t seem the wisest of moves, financially, when she and her husband Ed are about to launch a tree surgery concern, part funded by Ed’s brother Will. That, by the way, is a bit like Cain and Abel going into business together – if Cain and Abel had once been sleeping with the same woman (the aforementioned Emma herself). Be that as it may, I declare a shot to be drunk whenever one of George’s deluded family members refer to him as “a good lad”.
In other news, Brian is dating Justin’s ex-wife Miranda. Perhaps predictably in a village where, anthropologists might note, endogamous coupling is unusually, and worryingly, rife.
