It has been a cold, bleak month, and Jenny is still dead, and The Archers has officially been too sad, as it trudges along at the pace of life itself, and the Aldridge family falls apart and together again after the matriarch’s death.
Anyone who has lost someone close, especially a mother, can recognise the weird limbo that a family enters between a death and a funeral. Grief isn’t just sadness, it’s a mix of emptiness and guilt and anger and forlornness and loneliness. Everyone in a family has the cocktail made up in different proportions, and no one can quite recognise the signals their emotions are giving them. Lilian felt furious and betrayed: Jenny didn’t tell her, but did tell Tony and Brian, about her fatal heart problem. But really, Lilian was suffering from the shock and terror of watching her sister die, and not being able to do a damn thing about it.
Kate has been convinced she should sell her wellness business, Spiritual Home, and work on the family farm. Alice has been dying for a drink. Adam was numb at first, then found himself sobbing his heart out on the banks of the Am. Ruairi, having now lost his second mum, is not speaking to Brian and seems utterly lost – especially now that Julianne has dispensed with his escortly services and cast him off like an old rag. Brian himself has been in denial, taking naps next door at Kirsty and Roy’s place just to get away from his family with their incessant demands that he choose a casket etc.
Still, as Homer said, the generations of humans are like leaves. The farming year ticks on, with or without Jenny’s calming presence. The cows still need feeding, and lambing time is upon us. David Archer was witnessed by Linda Snell in the Brookfield kitchen, stripped to the waist, washing afterbirth off his torso. “It’s not an episode of Poldark,” she pointed out, unnecessarily. (David is many things, but Aidan Turner is not among them.)
In the end, the Aldridge family managed to come together for the funeral. And, because Susan’s asparagus and avocado terrine collapsed with the sound of a thousand blancmanges plotzing, Jenny ended up catering for her own wake, after Brian remembered that huge lamb, leek and prune pie she’d put in the freezer soon before she died.
Actually, the idea of Jenny being outlived by her own cooking is almost the saddest thing of all.
