Jasmine Hyde (Leonie Snell)
It gets worse – not only is
Leonie still in Ambridge, but it doesn't look like she's going back to London
any time soon. Lynda asks her, rather pointedly, what about work and aren't
they missing her? Leonie plunges a dagger into our hearts when she replies that
she is taking unpaid leave. "Don't worry," she says, "I'll be
around for a while yet." She also mentions that her company said
"take as long as you want" – I bet they are secretly planning to move
offices while she is away and that profits have soared.
At Peggy's 88th birthday
party, Tom and Brenda take the mickey out of Leonie, comparing her to the nurse
in the film 'Misery'. Sadly she hasn't seen it, but James has and he's not best
pleased with Tom and Brenda's sniggering. "I don't get the joke" says
a mystified Leonie. "That's because there isn't one, sweetie" replies
James, tartly. Honestly – "sweetie" – I ask you!
Lynda still tries to find
out how long will Leonie be in Ambridge. "How long do broken bones take to
heal?" she answers. 20 minutes. Get your bag packed Leonie – get off those
crutches and get on the train, James. Bye! Don't forget to write.
Ed and Emma's financial
plight gets even worse when she visits the supermarket and finds out that there
is no money in the bank account. She asks the food bank for a food box, but
apparently it is not enough just to be destitute; you have to be poorer than
that. However, they do give her a hot meal. As she is eating it, mother Susan
comes in, bringing donations and the whole story comes out. Had Susan known,
she could have cut out the middleman and dropped the food off at Rickyard
Cottage.
Actually, I have a plan to
solve Ed and Emma's problem; we know that customers have been deserting the
milk round (Mike has reduced what he pays Ed, which is half the trouble) so
presumably the volume of milk needed has gone down. If you don't need so much
milk, it follows that you don't need so many cows, so the answer is to
slaughter one of the cows, butcher it and eat it. With luck it should last for
months. Not only that, but Emma can show her versatility and good husbandry by
turning the hide into shoes for Keira. The horns could be turned into Christmas
presents and the hooves into ashtrays – get that gun out now, lad.
The prize for the most
unconvincing about-face this week goes to Freddie. He came home from school
full of gloom because that night his extra-curricular maths lessons with
Iftikar were due to start. "I thought you liked Iftikar?" asks
Elizabeth. "But I don't like maths" came the sullen reply. Ifti
turned up and correctly divined the situation, telling Freddie to get his coat
on as they would be working outside. We were treated to the description of an
obtuse isosceles triangle etched on a pediment, with Ifti telling Freddie that
"everything comes down to maths."
I suppose it helps if you
live in a stately home – it provides more opportunities for mathematical study.
You could calculate the volume of water in the moat, or divide the number of
rooms by the number of servants, or work out the square root of the number of
acres in the deer park. You could even go up on the roof and work out the
velocity of a falling object – a father, say.
But back to the
unconvincing about-face. Elizabeth comes out to see how they are getting on
(can't she trust anyone to do their job properly) and, when she speaks to
Freddie, he is positively orgasmic over mathematics and practically booking his
university course in pure and applied maths. I'm sorry, but nobody is that good a teacher.
Lilian sloped off to meet
Paul in a pub on Sunday lunchtime and he proved that he cannot know her very
well by asking whether it was gin and tonic that she liked? Let's face it – if
he really knew her, he would have had eight or nine of them lined up – and outside
in the smoking area at that. The meeting lasted just long enough for Lilian to
down one G&T (about three nano-seconds) and they both say how much they
enjoyed it. The only unhappy person was the barman who, having been tipped off
that Lilian Bellamy was coming, had chartered a fleet of Beefeater tankers and
cornered the entire Portuguese lemon crop, only to have her leave early.
Lilian returns home, where
Matt orders her to get him a sandwich and tells her that, when he met Brenda
outside her house, she had invited him in (he wanted to talk over some
business) and he had been confronted by Tom, singing "I love you
baby", with the curtains drawn and candles and Love Hearts all over the
place, in order to cheer Brenda up as she has been stressed. We weren't told,
thank God, but I reckon Tom might have been in his underpants, which is an
image that I'm having trouble getting out of my head. Back at the Dower House,
Matt moans "I can't move for couples drooling all over each other." "It's
called romance, Matt" replies Lilian. Tell you what Matt, with Paul back
on the scene, I'd try a little drooling if I were you.
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