This is one I remember properly, which is why it's getting the length. Last of the year, and it came with the first snow worth the name. Right trainer, navy, on the wall by the chapel at Linthwaite, dusted white on top the way a thing gets when it's been out all night and the snow's come gently. The notebook records the cold, the snow, and flask conditions good. What it doesn't record, and what I remember anyway, is that the village were quiet in the particular way snow makes a place quiet, and that I stood a minute before I got the notebook out, which isn't like me, but it were that sort of morning.
The laces are the thing. They were knotted together and looped over themselves — not tied as worn, but tied as stored, if that distinction lands. In the field I wrote that it were a configuration I'd not recorded before, and I noted it with some care on account of that. There's a small drawing of the knot in the margin, done in pencil with cold hands by the look of the line, and I'd forgotten doing it entirely until the transcribing brought it back up. It's not a bad drawing. Two loops and the trailing ends, and an arrow I can't now account for.
Here's where the transcribing earns its keep. I did the 2019 notebook a few weeks back and the 2020 one after it, and when I copied this entry out summat about the drawing nagged, so I went back through. Skipton, June 2019, number 156: right boot, brown, and the note says 'laces tied together and looped over themselves' — the words are there, near enough the same words, but no drawing. Digley, September 2020, number 178: right trainer, navy, and the note says 'laces knotted together' and stops, nowt about the loop. So each of the older entries has got half of what the Linthwaite drawing shows, and neither has the whole of it. And I'll set down the other thing while I'm at it, because the register would notice even if I tried not to: Digley and Linthwaite are two navy trainers, both right feet, fifteen months apart.
Now. The field entry says I'd not recorded the configuration before, and that entry stands as written, because that's what I honestly believed stood on the wall with the snow coming down, and the register holds what were known when it were known. I'll not be going back into 2019 with a rubber. What I've done is put a pencil note in the margin of the transcription — see 156, see 178 — and that's the length of it. As to whether that's one thing or three things, I couldn't tell you, and finding out isn't really the point of what I do. Three shoes over thirty months in a district that produces shoes. Barry would likely want a folder opening. There'll be no folder. The register's job is to hold what's found, not to join it up, and a register that starts joining things up stops being a register.
The rest of the entry is the year closing itself down, and it reads like I knew it. Twenty-one for 2021, which I noted at the time were tidy, and I'd been half aware walking up that owt found in December would round it off. You try not to want a find — wanting skews the eye — but I'll not pretend the chapel wall didn't oblige. The sandwiches were cheese and pickle, and the entry says 'for the record', which tells me I were writing the year's last lines and knew it. The notebook were nearly full an' all — this entry finishes three pages from the end, and a year and a notebook coming to their ends together is the sort of small satisfaction this work runs on.
Linda had the tea on when I got back. That's in the entry too. Reading it all now, with the snow and the drawing and the knot sat half-described in two earlier notebooks the whole time, waiting for the transcribing to line the three of them up — it's odd, I'll grant that much, but odd is allowed. The record held. December 2021, closed.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.