There's no room for a stool in a ginnel, so I stood. Left shoe, black, a work shoe by the look of the toe, laces in, heavily creased, up against the wall in the ginnel off Scar Lane at Golcar. Overcast but dry. Golcar is all ginnels and steps, and I'm surprised it hasn't given the register more than it has.
The flask stopped in the car for this one, which the notebook records without comment, and I'll add the comment now: a ginnel is a thoroughfare, and a man stood drinking tea in a thoroughfare invites conversation, and conversation slows the notes. Two photographs, one come out. The shoe were heavily creased across the toe the way a work shoe gets when it's knelt in daily, which I noted as condition and nowt else.
The book says an ordinary shoe in an ordinary spot is worth recording an' all, else the register would only be the strange ones, and I'd stand by that as the most important sentence I wrote in 2018. A register that only keeps the strange ones isn't a register, it's a scrapbook. Number 134 is in for the same reason a census counts everybody. It weren't the shoe's fault it were unremarkable, and it got the same care as the rest.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.