“When I mentioned to a friend I was writing a book about eggs he told me to be sure to mention how in Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” the young Arabella incubates a sky-blue egg of a song bird in the cleavage of her bosom... When I checked, I was disappointed to find it wasn’t a song thrush egg, but that of a chicken... The original image in my mind disintegrated like the sound of a vinyl record after the power has been turned off.”
