***
He lived in the past and his memory in this respect was wide, precise and boring.
***
[Not quite a full-fledged silly name, imo, but a "slightly silly" one--along the lines of the Pythons' Slightly Silly political party.]
Mr. Benjamin Butterworth
***
Of the old firm of Butterworth, Coughey, Mills, Butterworth and Mills, Solicitors, only Mr. Simeon Mills survived. This was somewhat of a public relief, for previously, nobody had known which Butterworth was which in the firm's title and as for the other Mills, he might have been the invisible man; no-one ever knew or saw him.
***
[The residents of an insular village] spoke freely to each other, but answered "foreigners" in monosyllables, as though suspecting that any friendly gestures would result in the strangers taking the liberty of marrying into their families and removing their closely-guarded building-society deposits into alien communities.
***
She... grumbled that it wasn't long since the meter-man was there before.
"Yes. We're getting a bit ahead of ourselves at the gas-works," said Blades. "If we go on like this, we'll be meeting ourselves coming back!"
***
[Descriptions that compare people to eggs never get old for me.]
Enthroned among the rest of the customers sat a portly man, with a bald head, like an egg thrusting itself from a deep, stiff collar. He was the mortgagee of the premises and came regularly every day to eat two boiled eggs, which, in their white cups, looked like small replicas of him. Now and then, he would raise his eyes, which were like cloudy-grey poached eggs, from his plate and scan the place critically, as though putting the whole lot under the auctioneer's hammer then and there.
***
[Bonus: A reference to "flatulent Eccles cakes," which of course make me imagine an indignant reaction from the Goons (whom this book predates).]
