Pamela Shropshire’s Reviews > Love Among the Chickens > Status Update

… I would no more have ventured to break in on Ukridge’s thoughts at that moment then, if I had been a general in the Grand Army, I would have opened conversation with Napoleon during the retreat from Moscow.
😆

His whole career, as long as I had known him, had been dotted with little eccentricities of a type which an unfeeling world generally stigmatizes as shady.

[The golf game is superb. So funny!]

Then, when his hair has turned white with the strain, and he’s lost a couple of stone in weight, and his eyes are starting out of his head, and he’s praying – if he ever does pray – to the Gods of Golf that he may be allowed to win, I shall go ahead and beat him by a hole. I’ll teach him, Robert. He shall taste of my despair, and learn by proof in some wild hour how much the wretched dare.😂

‘I learned last night that she loved me. But she will not marry me without your consent. Stretch your arms out straight from the shoulders and fill your lungs well and you can’t sink. So I have come this morning to ask for your consent.’ 😂

[I love how Ukridge had promised mountains of eggs to all the grocers long before he ever got the chickens. Definitely counting his chickens!!!]

I had a vision of an eggless London. I seemed to see homes rendered desolate and lives embittered by the slump, and millionaires bidding against one another for the few rare specimens which Ukridge had actually managed to despatch to Brompton and Bayswater. 😂

…my mind ranged idly over large subjects and small. I thought of love and chicken-farming. I mused on the immortality of the soul and the deplorable speed at which two ounces of tobacco disappeared.

… A Bolshevist hen, always at the bottom of any disturbance in the fowl-run, a bird which ate its head off daily at our expense and bit the hands which fed it by resolutely declining to lay a single egg.

… sunny morning, of the kind which Providence sends occasionally, simply in order to allow the honest smoker to take his after-breakfast pipe under ideal conditions. These are the pipes to which a man looks back in after years with a feeling of wistful reverence, pipes smoked in perfect tranquility, mind and body alike at rest. (Think Merry & Pippin after the fall of Isengard.) 🥰

He had a persuasive way with him, and the tradesmen seemed to treat him like a favourite son. The things began to pour in from all sides, – groceries, whiskey, a piano, a gramophone, pictures. Also cigars in great profusion. He was not one of those men who want but little here below.