You get the motorway up on the bridleway above Scammonden Water — there's no pretending otherwise, the M62 is right there and the path goes under it — but the water makes up for it, and on a warm clear morning at the end of May the whole thing balances out better than you'd think. I've never held the motorway against Scammonden. The reservoir were built alongside it and the two of them have rubbed along ever since.
Right sandal, man's, brown, the buckle sort, so no laces and nowt in that column but the usual 'n/a'. Fair condition — this season's, I'd say, hardly weathered at all, the leather still holding its colour. A sandal at the end of May is seasonally sensible, unlike the Greenfield one of April 2023, which the notebook doesn't mention but which I thought of at the time, because you do start cross-referencing in your head after this many years.
Sat on the stool with the water below and the wagons going over the top. Egg and cress. And the entry's real news, underneath the sandal: tea still hot at eleven, which I put down to the new stopper, and which the notebook records with what I can only call satisfaction. The old stopper had been letting the heat creep out since the winter and I'd finally done summat about it. Three photographs, all came out — a clear day and a still subject and no excuses. It's the sort of morning that doesn't make the highlights of a year but holds the middle of it together, and the middle is where most of a year is.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.