The last of the year, and it made me wait for it. Five weeks with nowt after the Meltham Road brogue — the longest dry spell of 2024 — and then this, under the bench by the top gate at Greenhead Park on a morning of hard frost. Left boot, black. Laces in, and frozen stiff, which is a condition I'd not had cause to record before: the laces stood off the boot like wire. The paths were white and the park were near empty, just me and a man running and neither of us troubling the other.
Flask conditions excellent. The notebook offers a theory here, which I'll pass on for what it's worth: tea keeps better in the cold, I've noticed, or happen I just want it more. Two years on I've still not settled which it is, and I've stopped trying, both answers coming to the same cup. I sat a few minutes despite the weather — under the circumstances the boot had earned it, being December's only entry and the year's last.
Twenty-six for the year. The notebook says I'd not have credited it when I started this, and that's true of more than the number. 2024 were the year the register stopped being just me — Barry, Stuart, Meg58, Marjorie off the 324, the railway man I never met — and this boot were a fitting one to close on precisely because it were nobody's tip. I found it meself, on an ordinary walk, the way the first boot were found near Marsden in October 2009. Fifteen years and two hundred and eighty-seven shoes apart, them two, and the procedure identical: note it, photograph it, leave it as found, go home for tea. Nowt else came before the year turned, and the notebook went in the drawer with its last page written, which is the right way for a year to end.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.