It’s all kicking off at the veterinary surgery. Denise finally confessed to her mamil of a husband, John, that she’s in love with her boss, vet Alistair. If that weren’t enough, Denise’s fellow vet nurse, Paul – who is also her son – found out about the affair in the worst possible way, by overhearing the lovers discussing The Situation.
Paul is understandably furious: both his blood family and his work family, already fatally entwined, are being upended. His first instinct was to resign. Persuaded away from that course of action, he is continuing to work at the surgery, but on the condition that his interactions with Alistair and Denise operate only on a professional level. Cue: froideur across the operating table. Jakob, the other vet, got so fed up with the atmosphere of tension, fury and gloom that he threatened to call head office. All of which goes to show that the ancient saying “Don’t screw the crew” is an excellent principle to live by – if admittedly difficult to adhere to.
The news is out across Ambridge. Emma Grundy is being sensationally judgmental, in a manner that ill-behoves someone who shagged two brothers simultaneously such that Evil George had to be the subject of a paternity test, back in the day.
Talking of whom, Evil George is unravelling a little bit: drinking shots at the bar of the Bull, telling people to stop calling him a hero – and, can one have heard aright, even suffering from a touch of performance anxiety in the trouser department. None of this is surprising: he caused a crash that nearly killed several Ambridgeites, manoeuvred comatose Alice into the driver’s seat of her car after the event to make it look like it was all her fault – and then took credit for rescuing people from the Am after the accident for which he was solely responsible.
Alice has just returned from rehab. It’s clearer than ever that Chris, her ex-husband, loves her. She’s determined to plead not guilty in the forthcoming trial: will she be the third Ambridge woman to do time since the early 1990s? In this, as in so many things, this tiny English village would be a remarkable statistical outlier. See also: the number of trees in the immediate Ambridge area that have mysteriously fallen just as Emma and Ed have started a tree-surgery business.
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Over at the abattoir, someone stuck a pig’s snout in Freddie’s pocket, a reference to his squealing on a colleague who’d been stealing meat. Vince, the slaughterhouse owner, actually referred to it as “horseplay”. If one of my colleagues left a pig’s snout in my pocket, I’d be out of here with an assumed name and a new life living on a beach in Goa, Jason Bourne style.