The first hung shoe in the register. Right boot, tan, laces knotted together and slung over the towpath railing by the Calder at Mirfield. Nine years in, and every shoe to that point had been sat, stood or lain. This one were hung, and I recorded the hanging as a fact, nowt more, because the moment you start on why a shoe is hung you've left the job and joined the audience.
Grey, with rain by eleven, and I got the photographs in before it come — two come out. Flask conditions good while they lasted, which is the notebook's phrasing and I've always liked it. A hung shoe photographs different to a sat one. It holds its shape. The tan boot over that railing is one of the better photographs of 2018, grain and all.
Barry rang in the evening — this is in the book, because by 2018 I'd started logging correspondence — to say he'd once seen a hung one at Batley. I asked him for particulars. I'm able to report, from the distance of 2026, that the particulars never fully arrived. Barry's a good man and a genuine submitter, been sending sightings in since 2013, but the Batley hung shoe stayed at the level of 'a few year back, near the precinct', and you can't enter that. It sits in the correspondence file, not the register. There's a difference, and Barry knows there's a difference, and we've never fallen out over it.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.