This is one of the entries I don't need the notebook for, though I've got it open in front of me all the same, and the page and my memory more or less agree, which isn't always the case with these transcriptions. Thirteenth of August 2016. Right boot, brown, by the overflow steps at Butterley. Laces in, tied in a double knot. Good condition. And then, further down the entry, three words: that makes a hundred. I'll come to the three words.
I knew it were coming. Ninety-nine had gone in the book at Royd Edge at the end of July, so I'd been stood on ninety-nine a fortnight, and I'll admit the number were in my head when I set off that morning. Half seven, as usual. Our Linda did the sandwiches — cheese and pickle, my memory says, though the notebook doesn't record it so I'll not swear to it. I didn't tell her the next one would be the hundredth. It weren't a secret. It just weren't a thing you'd say over breakfast.
I hadn't picked Butterley for the occasion, because you can't pick where a shoe will be, that's the whole of it. But Butterley is where it were, second time that year, by the overflow steps, which is a crackin' bit of stonework whatever else is going on. The double knot is what the notebook remarks on ahead of anything else, and rightly. You don't often see a double knot on a lone shoe. Somebody tied that boot intending it to stay tied. I don't speculate on how a shoe comes to be where it is — that's not really the point of what I do — but a double knot is a decision, and I'm allowed to note a decision. Whose, and why, isn't mine to go into. I noted it and left it noted.
Then I sat with it. The stool were four months old that August, bought in the April after Our Linda passed comment on the state of my trousers, and already part of things, though it still smelled of the camping shop. So there I were, on a four-month-old stool by a reservoir in Marsden, thinking back, as you would, to a field gateway on the other side of the same village, October 2009. A right boot, brown, photographed on my phone, and no notebook yet worth the name. Not quite seven years between them, and the two boots not so different if I'm honest. First one brown and right, hundredth one brown and right. I noted that an' all, in my head if not on the page. The reservoir made nowt of it. Weather were fair, flask conditions good.
As for the three words. I remember sitting there with the pen and considering whether the occasion wanted a line or two more, and deciding it didn't. That makes a hundred. Anything past that would have been about me — how I felt, what it all meant, that sort of carry-on — and the register isn't about me, it's about the shoes. The boot didn't know it were the hundredth. It would have been poor form for me to go on as if it did. Reading it back ten years on, I'm satisfied. Happen it's the best three words in the book.
The photograph came out, which I were glad of, it being the one a person might reasonably ask to see. I drank the tea, ate what were left of the sandwiches, folded the stool, and drove home. Our Linda asked if I'd had a good day and I said I had, and that were the end of it. She didn't know there'd been owt to mark, because I hadn't said, and that were correct. The hundred were the register's business. Three weeks later there were a black brogue in the lane below the church at Farnley Tyas, number a hundred and one, and the book carried on the way a book should.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.