The hot one. If you were in this country on the nineteenth of July 2022 you'll not need telling, but for the record: hottest day I've known in this district or any other. They said forty degrees and I'd believe it. The notebook wrote it down plainly at the time and reading it back now still feels like reading about somewhere else.
I went out early and were back by ten, and even then the heat were coming up off the towpath at Milnsbridge like summat solid. The find were near the bridge at Morley Lane. Left slip-on, brown, no laces to record. Dry as a crisp and curled at the toe — the whole shoe had cupped in the heat like a leaf does, and I'd not seen that before and haven't since. Two photographs, quick ones, both came out. Not a morning for sitting, the notebook says, and it weren't; the stool stayed in the car and I'd not have used a bench if one had offered.
And then the detail that makes this entry what it is: the flask stayed in the bag. The notebook records it as the first time I could remember that happening, and four years on I can confirm it remains the only time. Through frost, hail, gales and everything else this district supplies, the flask has always come out. On the nineteenth of July 2022 it did not. I've thought about whether to be ashamed of that and decided against. There is weather for tea and that morning were outside it, and a register that won't record its own exceptions isn't worth keeping. Number 225: the shoe that curled, and the day the flask stopped in the bag.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.