The Butterley spillway is a crackin' spot, one of the best in the district, and that's the book's word, not a 2026 flourish. When the entry uses that word you know the morning earned it.
Right trainer, white, laces tied, upright on the steps of the spillway, three down from the top. The spillway were running after a week of rain and the noise of it were considerable — you feel it in the ground as much as hear it — and a white trainer sat upright on those great stone steps with the water coming down beside it is a sight I can still call up without the photographs, though the photographs help.
I gave it the full hour on the stool, which by 2019 were the mark of a serious entry. The full hour is not spent doing owt in particular. It's spent sitting with the shoe and the spillway and the flask, and the book records flask conditions excellent, egg and cress, a Penguin. All the elements present and correct.
Eight photographs and most came out, the light being kind for once, which at Butterley it usually isn't. Between the light behaving, the spillway running, and the flask at its best, this were the finest sit of 2019 by a distance, and in a year of twenty-two shoes that's saying summat. If a man could order his mornings from a catalogue, he'd order that one.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.