No thaw. A little more snow last night. Cannot unfreeze kitchen tap but unfroze the waste pipe by pouring boiling water down the straight part & hanging hot water bottle over the bend. Tried to dig a hole to bury some refuse but found it impossible even with the pick. Even at 6” depth the ground is like a stone.
9 eggs.
Orwell Diaries 1938-1942 
Excuse me for not quite seeing the joke, but why is a supposedly political blog wittering on about the weather and frozen pipes?
The political blog is yet to be found – still in someone’s attic I suppose.
Andromeda~~
Excellent!
wordsmithuk~~
Perfection!
“wordsmithsuk”
Andromeda: what have you got against the weather and frozen pipes? I bet you don’t even like eggs.
I wonder how he keeps the chickens warm enough to keep laying.
Andromeda,
George Orwell kept many journals, all of which had various purposes. This journal was to keep up with agricultural and climate change. This seems to be the sole purpose of this journal. The main purpose for reading this journal is to study Eric’s literary brilliance.
jon l
In my opinion, the Egg Count has—single-handed—orchestrated the focus of this log through the feasts and famines [of entries] of the past 16 months; as such, it [the Egg Count] is sacrosanct.
It [the Egg Count] has sustained me.
The Egg Count has inspired me to read Orwell’s works of the concurrent period with an objectivity impossible otherwise.
Not only that, but the Egg Count also generates the power necessary to operate the Wormhole in a nominal configuration sufficient to transport me to the worlds of my parents when they were yet teenagers on opposite sides of the planet. It [the Wormhole] has no entrances to places like Warsaw or Finland or Toledo or Moscow or Shanghai, but there are portholes along the way which are quite sufficient.
Hey Andromeda
It’s a fair response, though to be honest no-one ever told us it was going to be a +political+ diary; that’s just our preconception of Orwell created from reading his political writing. But should it surprise us to find that a writer is also a handyman, gardener, egg counter, bird watcher?
And does not this insight into Orwell’s daily life carry its own political significance? It might not be politics as we get from 1984. But you want England? You want life? Here he is, deep in the English countryside at a time of war, a handy man practical and phlegmatic, hacking the frozen soil, counting white owls and thawing the pipes with a hot water bottle. He built a hen house not an air raid shelter, and he is sitting there scrupulously recording the egg count.