Moss starting on the heel — which in my experience is roughly a winter's worth. The notebook offers that as its one piece of dating, and it's the sort of dating I allow myself: what the shoe shows, not what I imagine for it. Right trainer, white, badly weathered, laces perished, in the trees by the water board track at Ramsden Reservoir on the Holmfirth side. Perished is different from missing and different again from gone — perished means the laces are present but no longer laces in any working sense — and I keep the three words separate in the book for good reason.
Warm, and the midges bad in the trees, which anybody who's stood still near water in a West Yorkshire August will not need explaining. The entry says I kept the sit-down short on their account, and I remember that as a genuine contest — the spot deserved a proper sit and the midges overruled it. The flask were good, which made the shortness of the sit worse rather than better. Good tea hurried is a small waste you carry all day.
The photographs came out grainy, and the book adds 'which suits', and it does. A weathered white trainer going green at the heel in the shade of trees is not a subject that wants sharpness. My photographs have tended grainy since 2009 and I've never bothered to fix it, and entries like this one are why. Number 249, one shy of a milestone, though I'll say honestly that on the day I weren't counting ahead. The counting-ahead came later in the month, over Denby Dale way.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.