Most of these notebooks I have to work at. I'll sit with an entry a while, transcribing, and it'll come back in pieces or not at all, and I put down what's written and no more, because that's the honest way to do it. This one I don't have to work at. The 4th of November 2017 I can walk through end to end, and I'll allow it a bit more room than the notebook gave it, because for once I can vouch for the rest.
Fog all morning and it never lifted. That's what I wrote, and it's the sort of line that reads like a complaint but isn't one. Golcar sits high on the valley side, and when the Colne Valley fills with fog the village doesn't sit above it or below it — it sits in it. I set off at half seven as usual and drove up into the cloud somewhere past Milnsbridge, and from there on the world were about forty yards across and moved with me. Terraces coming out of the white and going back into it. A man with a dog, then no man and no dog. I remember all of that, though the notebook records none of it, because the notebook weren't for that.
The shoe were a left trainer, black, mud right through it, laces tied, on the setts at Town End. I want to be plain about what I mean by right through — not mud on it, mud through it, in the weave of the thing, the sort a shoe takes on over open ground and a fair amount of it. And it were sat on clean setts, in the middle of a village. I noted the fact. I did not note the question, because the question is not what I do, and I'd say the fog made that easier than usual. On a day like that you take what's in front of you, forty yards at a time, and you don't ask where owt come from because you can't see where owt come from.
One photograph, and it didn't come out. This surprised nobody, least of all me. It were 2017, the camera were the one that gives everything a bit of grain at the best of times, and the best of times that day were fog you could lean on. I looked at the print later and it could have been the trainer, or the setts, or the inside of the flask. I kept it anyway. I keep them all.
Flask conditions good — I wrote that an' all, and I stand by the entry more than most, because the flask doesn't care about fog. That's one of the things I value in it. The weather can take the view, the light, and the photograph, and the flask carries on regardless. Tea at the right heat, milk in, sat on a wall I could only see half of. I couldn't tell you what were in the sandwiches. The notebook doesn't say, which by 2017 usually means cheese and pickle, but I'll not swear to it. No stool that day. I'd had no feeling about it, and there'd have been nowhere dry to set it in any case.
The drive home I remember better than the drive out. Coming down off Golcar the fog stopped like summat had drawn a line under it, and I dropped out of the bottom of the cloud into an ordinary grey afternoon that had been there all along. You forget, up in it, that the day is still going on underneath.
And then the last line of the entry, which has nowt to do with shoes: 'Our Linda had the fire on.' Five words. I don't let the house into the register — the register is for what's out there, and the house is the other half of it, the half that doesn't get written down. Every outing in these books ends the same way and none of them say so. This one says so, once, and transcribing it now I'm glad of the lapse, because I can place the whole day from them five words — the fog, the wet setts, the trainer with the mud through it, the drive down out of the cloud, and the fire on when I come in. Some entries are about the shoe and some are about the day the shoe were in. This were the second sort, and I knew it at the time, which is rarer than you'd think.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.