Ginnels do produce. I've found that over the years and the notebook states it as settled fact by 2022. They're awkward for photography, mind — narrow and dark even in June — and this one, off Knowl Road in Golcar, halfway down where the setts start, were no exception. Overcast and mild outside the ginnel; inside it, the usual permanent dusk.
Right trainer, white, laces gone, tongue missing an' all, condition poor. A trainer loses its tongue and it's on its way out of being a trainer at all, but it counts, it's a lone shoe, and it went in the register with the same care as owt else.
The notebook records the conversation and I'll repeat it because it's a fair sample of the public side of this work. A woman came out of her back gate while I were crouched down with the camera, and I explained meself, and she said she'd wondered how long it would be before somebody dealt with that shoe. Now — I didn't deal with it. You can't interfere; the shoe stayed exactly where it were, tongueless, and for all I know it's there yet. But I didn't go into all that with her, because she went back in satisfied and there's no kindness in following a person up their own garden path to explain that you're not the council. The notebook records the exchange without comment and I've added the comment now, seventeen years into keeping this register: people mostly want a shoe to be somebody's responsibility. In the ginnels of Golcar, on the eleventh of June 2022, it were mine, in the only sense I recognise. Documented. Not dealt with. There's a difference and I keep to my side of it.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.