Norristhorpe, and I'll deal with the geography straight away, same as the notebook did: that's the Heckmondwike side of the district, and any find over there gets checked carefully against the folder before it's written in. This one were checked. It weren't owt to do with all that. It were an ordinary left boot, black, work sort, laces undone, on the recreation ground near the goalposts, and it went in the register as the ordinary find it were. The folder stayed shut. I want that on the record because the area attracts a certain kind of attention and the register doesn't deal in that kind of attention.
Dry and warm, the grass parched from the summer — the whole rec the colour of a digestive biscuit, as everywhere were that August. Condition of the boot fair.
Barry met me there, it being his side of the district, and the notebook records that we had a sit and said little, which is how we both like it. I'll expand only slightly: Barry brought his own flask that day, which he'd started doing by then, so it were two flasks on a bench by the goalposts, and between us I'd say fewer than forty words the whole sit, most of them about the boot and one exchange about the state of the grass. People imagine this work is solitary. It mostly is, and I mostly prefer it. But a companionable silence with a man who knows why you're both looking at a boot is worth summat an' all, and number 227 has that folded into it, even if the register entry just says a boot.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.