When do we want it? Oooh, in about eight minutes’ time.
But it won’t be Pissed!Alice reversing her car over Martha - I haven’t been a good enough Gus fer that.
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Cue petrol tanker driver coming to the end of a 72-hour shift and deciding to take a short-cut through the village in 3, 2, 1…
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No, but to quote Bluebottle, she’s fallen in the water.
I couldn’t make out whether she caused George to drive into the river, or merely went into it herself and caused him to drive into the parapet of the bridge.
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I reckon Alice went into the river and George will panic and do a runner. It will be assumed that Alice was driving.
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Am I bad to hope it was Brian and Chris in the other car? (Although that would be a bad thing for vodka supplies in the short-to-medium term)
George is dim enough to try doing a runner, which might be entertaining. If he’s in the river, Emmur is going to be incandescent, which would also be most satisfying. Sods up the tree surgery course, too. Yippee!
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I think we were being set up to think it was Alistair, what with him leaving the shop at about the same time. Yes, I know he wouldn’t logically be driving in the opposite direction, but this is TA SWs we’re talking about.
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Alistair was leaving the shop at about six, just before its closing time, and George was on his way home after a party so probably not before eleven. So no, not Alistair and Denise, drat it.
George was driving Alice home, so either into the village on the road past the church in order to turn right and go back along the river to the next-but-one bridge, the narrow one leading to Home Farm, or else through the village and directly to the narrow bridge. So he was driving either into or out of the village, and we are none the wiser about whom he might have met or in what direction they might be going.
If I had been Joy or Alistair I would probably have rung either Chris or Brian about Alice buying the vodka, and if I were either Chris or Brian I would have rung Harrison, or even the actual police, to suggest that Little Red Car number plate VW18XYZ was probably being drunk-driven. This for everyone’s safety, because I’d be as worried about other people on the road as I would about Alice.
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I, on the other hand, would not. There was no reason for them to assume she wasn’t taking the vodka home, and she was a sober adult buying a legal product.
It could, of course, have been Joy in the mystery car. Which would be something, though the frightful hag is probably as indestructible as Lynda sodding Snell.
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It must have been the bridge to Home Farm - outside the village - because he said ‘you’re nearly home,’
The road ends at Ambridge Hall, passing April Cottage and Keeper’s Cottage and the turn off to Marney’s.
So no commercial traffic should be coming towards them. The only people likely to be on the road are Tom & Natasha or Robert & Lynda (who is a road safety freak).
According to the list Richard Locke also lives in one of the cottages but I guess he’s long gone.
What’s puzzling me is where was Alice parked and where was George heading, that he passed her?
And why did she get blackout drunk in her car when she has a lovely cottage to go to?
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But Joy lives at the housing development near Bridge Farm, on a completely different road. Plus I don’t have her down as a speed freak.
If the collision is supposed to have happened at one of the bridges in the village, George wouldn’t have said ‘you’re nearly home.’ And anyway where is George living atm. He called Will and told him to leave the door open.
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I think you’re right about doing a runner. He knows Alice is too wasted to remember anything, so she’ll be blamed for the accident. Want to bet he left his fruit cider can in the car? How long will it take Harrison to sleuth it out?
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Welcome, TTT! Pull up a bollard.
It is very clear to me that the scripties have talked to someone from Alcoholics Anonymous. To be fair, I think AA can do a great deal of good: but they are utterly wedded to their single model of how alcoholism always works and how all alcoholics behave, and now that it’s nearly a hundred years later and not in white Christian Depression-era Ohio, both of those things are increasingly unlikely to be accurate.
In the AA pattern, once you fall you’ve fallen all the way and you have no control over yourself; one tipple leads to a blackout bender, and the only way to stop is to get back with AA and give someone else control of your life. Not saying that never happens, but it’s certainly not universal or even common.
(I think it would be a mistake to try to analyse the psychology of Alice specifically, because her job is to be whatever the scripties say she is.)
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Welcome to the board, TumTeTum.
It must have been somewhere outside Ambridge; it would not have taken so very long to drive about a mile, which is the total distance available to drive in Ambridge.
In which case she had set out to go just anywhere away from Ambridge, and he was on his way back there (he lives in Number 1, The Green). My money might be on Borchester, six miles from Ambridge, and George walking out along the road home hoping for a lift. The fact that he has been presented previously as having the use of a car to ferry guinea-pigs around in Ambridge presumably doesn’t mean he’d have the use of a car to go into town to a party and get back after the buses have finished running; that is neither here nor there, because the plot demanded that he had to be on foot and thus able to drive Alice home. It may make complete nonsense, but that really isn’t something we have to worry about: the editorial team stopped caring about the plausibility of anything in the programme some time ago.
After all, when Alice started to open the door to get out and be sick two important things don’t make sense: one, she was able to get out of her seat-belt without any trouble at all, even though she was paralytically drunk and the seatbelt fastening was from her point of view on the wrong side, and two, George was unable to stop the car by (novel idea!) putting on the brakes and pulling in to the side of the road.
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I have known at least one person who, becoming aware that they drank far too much and were having trouble getting through the day without alcohol, pulled back from this and were abstemious almost all year round, but allowed themselves a drink or two at Christmas and on the Queen’s Birthday and other important celebrations. and on those occasions they were not drinking alone, and relied on members of their families or on their friends to say “Oy! You’ve had enough; it’s coffee time”.
Clearly these individuals can’t have been proper alcoholics, just people who for some years couldn’t get along without alcohol, and then after a distressing period during which they cut back their intake dramatically, could, but could drink in moderation.
I think it was also believed by many people to be unthinkable to give up smoking without the help of all sorts of patches and hypnosis and lord knows what all: the idea of simply deciding one day when the shops were shut and you’d run out of snout that you might as well stop was clearly impossible.
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Presumably because her lovely cottage contained her father, who was being so unsympathetic, and her ex-husband, who had made her feel bad about forgetting Unsquished Martha.
Not congenial.
Wotcher, btw.
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Welcome TTT
I await Alice sobering up and realising what she caused to happen
Could we be lucky and have George die in the accident?
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He was following the Am?
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And another Welcome for TTT from me.
A much needed laugh - Snork, even - thank you, Joe.
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Welcome TTT! I think there’s something left in the Gin Lake for them as does (since Alice hasn’t turned up today*)
All four is too much to hope for, I suppose…?
Well - three. They’ve already written out Real Robert and replaced him with MiserableGitBot. (“Robot Snell”?)
*She must think she works here…
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That was a very poor episode, quite apart from the disappointing lack of corpses. Too much shouting and splashing. Felt like the Grate Fludd all over again.
And such a wasted opportunity not to have Fallon drown in front of George. I’d have been a ray of sunshine for weeks. Really.
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