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.
