The first entry after number 229, and I'll say no more about that here — 229 has its own page and it says what I were prepared to say. Three weeks passed between the two, which is a longer gap than 2022 usually allowed itself, and I'll leave that where it lies an' all.
This were the first properly wet morning in months, and the notebook is almost pleased about it: the towpath glad of the rain, everything smelling of it, the whole canal corridor rinsed. Hood up, camera kept under the coat between photographs, which is the wet-weather procedure and has been for years. The find were on the towpath at Linthwaite, below the locks by Hoyle House Mill. Left trainer, grey, laces gone.
The useful detail: the trainer were half under the bridge, so it had kept dry, and the notebook observes that this made for a better record than the conditions deserved. That's the kind of luck you take. A dry subject on a wet day photographs like a co-operative witness. Three photographs, two came out. Condition fair. Flask conditions good, and the notebook adds that tea were welcome again after the summer, which after the flask-in-the-bag business of July I read now as a small restoration of order. The rain back, the tea back, a grey trainer under a bridge on the Huddersfield Narrow, and the register moving forward one line at a time, which is the only direction it knows. I walked up as far as the next lock before turning back, hood up the whole way, and counted the morning a good one, which by the standards of that September it were.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.