Fine, sunny, cold wind. Began clearing the vacant ground between the old garden & the new patch. Burnt a little of the rubbish. Limed another strip, also the rhubarb patch, but have not turned the lime in here. Collected the first sack of dead leaves (beech). Had noticed for two days that a brown hen was sitting out somewhere. Tonight found her nest – 10 eggs, 1 broken. Took the eggs, which may possibly be good, being unfertilized. Tonight she had gone back to the empty nest. Put her in the house, & hope she may be cured in a few days. This morning[1] shifted the wire of the run. Posts are not long enough for gate posts, but can have an extra piece fitted on if I can get hold of some timber. Yesterday, when sinking holes for the posts found that the chalk is only about 6” beneath the surface, but possibly it isn’t so all over the patch.
4 eggs. Sold 20 @ 3/6 (to milkman).
[1] Orwell originally wrote ‘Tonight,’ presumably when he was writing up his diary. Peter Davison
Orwell Diaries 1938-1942 
George~~
“Fine” is, often, followed by qualifiers in your posts; cumulatively, the effect has been to bring your definition of the word into question. Therefore: Do you agree that the word “fine” should never be used sarcastically? If so, why—if not, why not.
Did you hear that, today in Mexico City, Leon Trotsky is reported to have said that “Stalin is afraid of Hitler, and is right to be so.”
Is he selling those eggs that the brown hen laid who knows how long ago???
Yes. Potentially, we may be witnessing yet another variant of the Egg Count paradigm; that is, the seamier side or, maybe, the wartime side. Contrast this with when, not that long ago, Eric couldn’t coax enough eggs for a cake or, even, a lemon tart. Nevertheless, while Blair has every right to a return on his investment in top-of-the-line poultry and gourmet feed, I somehow doubt that he would sell rotten eggs to the milkman without, at least, a disclaimer.
Eavesdropped from within the pre-dawn shadows of a hedgerow:
A few weeks ago we found a similar number of eggs laid ‘out.’ We hard-boiled them, just in case, and decided whether to eat them on a case-by-case basis. All were acceptable. And we have roosters.
I’d say that, given the cool fall weather (and notwithstanding that the hen had taken to sitting on them) selling the eggs would be perfectly defensible in this case, if only to help slow the inflation in egg prices.