The notebook has this one down very calm, and it were a calm sort of find. Left boot, the work sort, steel toe by the weight of the look of it — I don't pick them up, so the look of the weight is all you get — set on the coping stones by Lock 23E at Slaithwaite. Laces missing altogether. Grey morning, no wind on the water, which on the Huddersfield Narrow is worth writing down because the water tells you everything about the day.
I sat a short while on the lock beam, which is recorded, and a man came past with a dog and asked what I were photographing. I told him, and he said right you are, and went on. I've had every sort of reaction over the years and that one remains among the best. No follow-up questions. The dog didn't bother with the boot either, which I've noticed dogs mostly don't, though I keep no formal record of it.
Flask were fine, the notebook says, which in January means it did its job. Condition of the boot poor, sole coming away at the toe — a boot that had worked for its living and then stopped, though how it came to be on the coping stones is not really the point of what I do. Three photographs, all came out, which for a grey January morning by water is a full house. Working boots on working canals sit right in a photograph, I find. This one did.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.