The year finished in a ginnel in Almondbury, and it finished with a first for the register: laces frozen stiff. Left shoe, black, lace-up, on the step of a bricked-up doorway off Westgate, and when I crouched down to record the laces they were stood up off the shoe like wire. Hard frost, everything white till ten. I'd not seen frozen laces in thirteen years of this work and the notebook logs it as a first, which is the sort of first the register exists to catch.
I'd been up Castle Hill before it, as I like a December walk up there whatever else the month holds, and I found this one coming back down through the village — so the year that opened with a trainer below the tower in January frost closed with a shoe found on the way down from the same hill in December frost. I make nowt of that. It's the shape the year happened to have, and Castle Hill being at both ends of it is what comes of going up Castle Hill a lot. But I'll admit I noticed.
Condition fair under the frost. Three photographs, all came out. Flask conditions excellent — the best of the year, the notebook says, which December often is; frost and a flask bring out the best in each other. And then the closing line of the 2022 notebook, which I'll copy out exact, because I read it now and hear meself writing it at the kitchen table with the register squared up for the winter: "That closed 2022. Thirty-one. A strong year." Nowt to add four years on. It were, and it remains, the strongest year the register has had, and number 234 shut the door on it properly, laces frozen, all recorded, home for tea.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.