This one come in through a channel I never set up and couldn't name. A man Barry knows from the model railway club saw it, mentioned it to Barry, and Barry rang me — so by November 2024 the register had, in effect, a second-hand correspondent network operating out of a model railway club in Dewsbury, and nobody had asked my permission, least of all me. The notebook remarks on it and I remember the feeling: the thing had channels now. It has more channels still in 2026. You build a register for fifteen years and then one day you find it's been building itself.
The shoe: right trainer, navy, by the canal basin at Brighouse, up against a mooring bollard. Laces in, untied. Decent condition. I confirmed it in person on the Saturday, as ever — the rule doesn't bend for railway men any more than it bends for Barry — and it were exactly where reported, which I noted with approval, third-hand information usually losing accuracy the way tea loses heat.
Cold morning, the first frost of the back end, and the basin had that hard early-winter stillness, boats shut up, ropes stiff. Photographs fine. I never met the model railway man and I don't know his name to this day — Barry offered to introduce us and I said there were no need, the trainer being confirmed and the register not being a social club. Barry said that were rather the attitude that kept it running proper, and I chose to take that as a compliment, and I still do.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.