Left child's shoe, blue, velcro fastening — so no laces to record, and the book duly records that there were none to record, because a blank field and an empty field are different things. It were under the bandstand railings at Beaumont Park. Small. The notebook has me estimating a four-year-old's, though I wrote at the time that I don't claim expertise there, and I'll stand by both halves of that.
Grey morning, drizzle setting in by ten, and I didn't stop long on account of it. Children's shoes I tend to deal with briskly anyway. I note them the same as any other — left or right, colour, fastening, placement — but I don't make a sit-down of them, and I couldn't tell you now whether that's a rule or just how it's always gone. The book doesn't say. Our Linda had sent me with egg and cress, which I had in the car with the drizzle on the windscreen, and there are worse ways to spend a January dinnertime than that.
One photograph, grainy, but it come out. The bandstand at Beaumont Park is a fine old thing and I remember thinking the railings gave the photograph a bit of order, though whether I thought that on the day or I'm thinking it now, I honestly couldn't separate for you. Three years on, that's the trouble with writing these up — the notebook is solid ground and everything else is weather. Number 236, noted proper, and left where it were.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.