Two hundred and fifty. I'd known it were coming, in the way you know a birthday's coming, and I'd wondered — privately, not in the book — whether the shoe that landed on the number would be worthy of it, which is a daft thought because worthiness isn't summat I hold shoes to. As it turned out, number 250 were a left boot, brown, laces gone, sole parting at the toe, in the long grass by a gate on a field edge off the A636 outside Denby Dale. An ordinary boot in an ordinary place, well past its working life. Looking at it now I think that were the right shoe for the number. If the two hundred and fiftieth had been summat remarkable, the milestone would have belonged to the shoe. This way it belonged to the register.
The notebook records that I noted it in the book and had a sit-down, which felt right — that's the phrase, 'which felt right', and it's about as close to ceremony as the register has ever come. Fine August morning, the harvest going on two fields over, so there were a combine working somewhere behind the hedge the whole time, which gave the sit a sort of accompaniment. Flask very good. Egg and cress. And a second Penguin, Our Linda having packed two without saying owt, and I've never asked her whether she knew what the count stood at. I suspect she did. She generally knows more than she lets on about where the numbers are up to.
Photographs came out. It's not a dramatic frame — long grass, a gate, a brown boot losing its sole — but I've looked at it more times than I've looked at most. Denby Dale had already given the register its most famous entry, the Layby Pair of 2021, and now it had given it a round number an' all. Some places are just willing. Fourteen years and two hundred and fifty shoes from a field gateway near Marsden to a field gate near Denby Dale, gateway to gateway, and I didn't plan that and I don't make owt of it. But I did notice it, and noticing is the job.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.