I’ve just been in Ukraine, where the basic barometer of a city’s security status is whether McDonald’s has reopened (open in Kyiv, still closed in Kharkiv). In Ambridge in the English Midlands, the basic barometer of having your wits about you is whether you can see through George Grundy. To his doting but dim grandmothers, Clarrie and Susan, the lad can do no wrong. Chelsea and Jazzer, on the other hand, know better. “That boy’s a jail sentence waiting to happen,” as the latter put it. Or is he? George seems to have a remarkable capacity to come up from every crisis smelling of roses – unlike Chelsea’s poor brother Brad, George’s unwilling accomplice in a Friday-night break-in of Grey Gables, which is currently a building site. A dozen overthought scruples delayed Brad’s apology to Oliver Sterling for the ruination of the memorial bench dedicated to his late wife, Caroline Bone. Sterling, a massive fail on the George Grundy Perspicacity Test, read Brad’s hesitation as turpitude.
The coronation has been competing with the Eurovision song contest for villagers’ attention. For the latter event, veterinary nurse Paul is intent on bringing a night of sequins and glitter to the Bull, in a fitting alliance with his only rival for the status of Ambridge’s campest character, Linda Snell. Jim, a person after my own heart at the best of times, owing to his curmudgeonly mien and habit of dropping into Latin quotation, has revealed himself as the village’s token republican. While the forelock-tugging peasantry picnic on the green is in full feudal array, having got sloshed on Kenton’s coronation cocktails in the Bull, he intends to listen to “uplifting music” at home with his curtains firmly closed.
“I’m fine. No I’m absolutely fine. We’re fine.” Increasingly tight-wound declarations of fine-ness from Helen Archer invariably mean she is about to explode. The reason for her tension is (oh happy day!) the fact that Borsetshire’s favourite villain, her coercively controlling ex-husband Rob Titchener, whom she stabbed in the kitchen of Blossom Hill Cottage in 2016, is back in the country, ostensibly to attend his evil mother Ursula’s funeral. Gothic-novel vibes are strongly circulating in the air around Bridge Farm. Will he show up and try once more to abduct his son? Will he come to haunt the happy household that Helen and her partner Lee have established? Oh, I do so hope so.
