Last shoe of 2016, and the register has a way of arranging these things — a right boot, brown, in a field gateway above Marsden, which is exactly how the whole register began in October 2009. Different gateway, this one being off Old Mount Road, and seven years and a hundred and five shoes between them. I record the echo as an echo and nowt more.
Laces in. Hard frost that morning, ground like iron, the notebook says, and I remember that sort of morning even if I can't honestly separate this one from the others like it. Flask conditions good — the tea kept well in the cold, which sounds backwards but any flask man will confirm it. A flask likes a cold day. It's the wind that beats it, not the frost.
The photograph came out clear, and the notebook credits the frost for that, which I'll stand by — frost firms everything up, the light is honest, and nothing moves. So the year's last picture were its best-lit. Eighteen shoes in 2016, the stool acquired, the hundred passed at Butterley without fuss, and it finished where the practice started, at a field gateway near Marsden, with a right brown boot in it. I closed the notebook and went home for me dinner.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.