A gateway shoe to close the year. The notebook saw the shape of it straight away: a right boot, brown, in a field gateway near Marsden, which is how the whole register began in October 2009 — though a different gateway and a different boot, and the entry is scrupulous on that point, as am I. Number 1 were a gateway on the other side of the village and fourteen years earlier. This were the gateway off Old Mount Road, two days before Christmas, and the only connection is the one a man notices when he's kept a book long enough for the book to start rhyming. I noted the fact and made nowt further of it. The register doesn't do omens. It does entries.
The boot itself: laces gone, leather stiff with the cold — stiff enough that the whole thing had set like a cast of itself, which happens to leather left out when the frost gets into it. Grey, quiet morning, the village gone still the way places go still just before Christmas, and Old Mount Road carrying nowt but me. I stood a while. The book says so, without saying how long, and I couldn't tell you now — long enough for the flask, which were good, and long enough to think whatever a man thinks stood at a gateway at the end of a year. The book doesn't record that either. Some fields I leave blank on purpose.
Twenty-eight for the year, which the entry calls a fair return and leaves there, and I'll leave it there an' all, except to say that reading 2023 back in full — the roundabout, the sandal at Greenfield, the moor above Meltham, two hundred and fifty at Denby Dale, Barry at Batley, the frost at Blackmoorfoot — I'd quietly rank it among the better years the register has had. The photograph came out. I drove home for me tea, and Our Linda asked if I'd found owt, and I said I had, and that were Christmas.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.