What Did You Do To That Egg?!

I well remember the first time I encountered a poached egg. I was perhaps 12 or 13 at the time, and visiting my grandmother. She asked if I’d like some bacon and eggs, to which I naturally replied that I would. Soon thereafter, she presented me with a plate containing bacon and a mysterious globby white thing.

A squarish white plate with chopped kale topped with a formless white glob sprinkled with seasoning.
Seasoned white glob OF MYSTERY on kale.

Being a shy and courteous child, I forbore to ask “where’s the egg?” but I must have made some sort of inquiry as to what “this” was, because she subsequently enlightened me: that was the egg. Due to a combination of the aforementioned courteousness and the formidable nature of my ex-military grandmother, I refrained from asking WHAT DID YOU DO TO IT?? but I certainly wondered. I also wondered why, when already frying bacon, one would not also fry the egg, but who knows – perhaps the bacon was grilled.

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Is There A Hell?

“I will not continue in a job which involves being kissed by worms like Claude Bates. No, no, no, sir!”

Mr Wrenn raised a shocked and wrathful face.
“He kissed you?”

“Yes. You had an article in the Home Companion last week, uncle, saying what a holy and beautiful thing the first kiss is. Well, Claude Bates’s wasn’t. He hadn’t shaved and he was wearing a dressing-gown. Also, he was pallid and greenish, and looked as if he had been out all night. Anything less beautiful and holy I never saw.”

“He kissed you! What did you do?”

Wim van den Heuvel en Yoka Berretty (1961)

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Mr Cornelius Recites

“I have lived in Valley Fields all my life, and would not live anywhere else if you offered me a million pounds.”

“I won’t.”

“I was born in Valley Fields, Mr Shotter, and I love the place, and I am not ashamed to say so.”

Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer above the sea of fog
“‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead,'” inquired Mr Cornelius. “‘Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d as home his footsteps he hath turn’d from wandering on a foreign strand?'”

“Ah!” said Sam. “That’s what we’d all like to know, wouldn’t we?”

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