Seven weeks between entry 171 and this one. The notebook doesn't explain the gap, it just says "First entry in seven weeks, which I'll leave as it stands," and I'll leave it as it stands now an' all. The register had known quiet spells before — the early winters could go five or six weeks without a shoe — but those gaps were the shoes' doing. This one weren't, and that's as much as wants saying about it.
What the gap doesn't show is that notebook five kept going all through it. The pages between 171 and 172 have no numbers on them because there were nowt to number, but they're not empty pages — dates, routes, weather, and then "nothing found," written out in full each time. We were walking from the house that spring, and every walk started and finished at the front door. Our Linda did the sandwiches same as ever, foil and all, for walks that were sometimes not above the hour, and never once suggested a walk that short didn't want a sandwich. The flask went out on every one of them, or near enough — the notebook backs me up on the flask more often than not.
The stretch of canal within reach of the house got gone over thoroughly in those weeks. Thoroughly is the word. I came to know every bridge hole and bench arm on it, which mooring rings were working loose, where the towpath held its puddles longest after rain. It gave me nothing the whole seven weeks. It came good in June, as it happens, but that's entry 173's business and I'll not get ahead of the book.
I want to say a word about "no laces to report," because it matters to how I keep the register. The plimsoll were the elastic gusset sort, so there were no laces, and a man in a hurry might leave the laces line blank. The notebook doesn't. It says "no laces to report," and them four words are the difference between a field left blank and a field recorded empty. Blank means you didn't look. Recorded empty means you looked, there were nothing, and you wrote the nothing down. The seven weeks in front of this entry are the same thing at a bigger size. Them walks weren't blank. They were recorded empty, and there's a steadiness in that which I didn't fully credit at the time and do now.
The sixteenth of May, then. Warm morning, park quiet early on. Right plimsoll, black, under the bandstand steps at Beaumont Park. I'm a moorland man by preference and a park were never my first choice of ground, but when your walks start at the front door you take the ground the front door gives you, and the park were getting more of my attention than it were used to — the notebook's words, and fair ones. Beaumont Park has been on the register since, and it earned its place that year rather than borrowed it. I had egg and cress on a bench facing the bandstand. I remember which bench, or I believe I do — six years on I've learned to put that down as belief rather than fact, because the notebook only says "a bench" and the notebook were there. Flask conditions good. Photograph came out — the notebook doesn't say whether it took more than one go, so I'll not claim it did or didn't.
I've given this entry more length than a black plimsoll would normally command, and I'm aware of it. It's one of the ones I remember properly, that's all. Not because the shoe were remarkable — it weren't, and I'd say so to its face — but because it were the entry that got the numbers moving again after seven weeks of recorded empty. The park did that, and the procedure did the rest. You work the ground you're given.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.