Bank holiday Monday, and the lanes above Holmfirth had more folk about than I'd like — the notebook says so, and then adds "but the shoe weren't bothered and neither were I," which is Notebook Five in a nutshell. That August everybody who'd been shut in all spring were out walking the same hills, and I don't begrudge anyone a hill, but a busy verge is a self-conscious place to crouch with a notebook. You get looks. The looks are not my concern.
Left shoe, dark brown, a derby by the eyelets — four of them — with the lace present on one side only. I'll note for the record, since I'm writing these up properly now, that a derby has open lacing, which is how you tell it from an oxford at the roadside without touching owt. It matters to be right about these things. The shoe were on the verge of the lane out of Hade Edge towards Dunford Road, high ground, the sort of lane where the wind gets a run at you even in August.
And it were cool for August — grey, dry, the book says, and I remember the greyness as the flat sort that doesn't threaten rain so much as decline to discuss it. Flask conditions good. Photograph came out a bit soft, which I'll take. Hade Edge would go on to give the register one of its most important entries a couple of years later, but in 2020 it were just a lane with a derby on it, and that were plenty.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.