Told you so. Every blessed time, every blessed man in Ambridge, they all get subsumed in the gooey tide of Fatherly Feelings even before the blessed sprog is more than a wistful notion of a few blessed cells.
("And, furthermore, it wasn’t “Bless.’” – Fred Godfrey, purported author of Bless 'Em All.)
I have never known a man to do this. Oh, sure, some blokes I’ve known are very good fathers, but even they certainly don’t go “oooooooh” over the idea of a scan, and if their partners walk out on them they fight for the brat only enough to make it look good - the last thing they want is to be a single father. So where are the blokes like that in Ambridge?
As for the scan itself… “I’m… I’m sorry, but it looks very much as though the baby is an Archer. Now, don’t panic, you have lots of options, and not everyone goes for termination these days…”
A nasty moment of meta-plot thinking suggests that if Pip never gets married, the show can continue to be about the Archers at Brookfield.
Ain’t that the truth. And it is rather noticable that yer actual single fathers - whether inconveniently widowed or (rare, this) competently abandoned together with the assorted F of their L by wicked, heartless women - are usual portrayed in a very rosy light and get lots of Help, Casserole and plaudits. Single mothers, not so much.
But I am deviating. Something of which on might feel there should be more in Ambridge, with commensurately fewer babies - but no, that earth’s been stopped too, damn their eyes.
You are not the only Cassandra to have come up with that one, Hedgers. Maybe she will marry Trex after all but as a sop to her hooting grandmother, insist they take the Archer name.
Her just bursting would still be favourite, of course.
“Watch out for that (combine harvester|bull|more than usually toxic bottle of Fairbrother Gin|more than usually toxic Fairbrother|silage tanker), Pip!”
I have known one single father who really did love and care for his children, having been left with them when they were aged six, four and two. They were all three very badly upset by their mother abandoning them – I don’t think they saw her again for about ten years – and he had a very difficult time for the first couple of years, but he persevered and made a good job of it. He got precious little help from anyone, though some of us did babysit for him when he went out in the evenings to earn money playing jazz.