This is the entry where the notebook goes faint, because my pen ran out halfway through the notes and I finished in pencil. I'd had that pen since 2022 and it had done three and a half years of shoes, which is a fair innings for a pen, but it chose its moment poorly. You can still read the pencil, just, and transcribing it now I've had the notebook tipped towards the window to get the last of it. After this I bought two of the same pen, one for the bag and one for the drawer, and that arrangement has held since.
The shoe itself were one of the more striking of the year. Right boot, black, army sort, laces tied together and looped over the beam of Lock 23E at Slaithwaite. Somebody had hung it there — that much is plain and I record it as plain — but the how and the why of it isn't my department, and the register doesn't deal in it. Weathered: a summer up there at least, happen more, going by the state of the leather and the laces having gone stiff in their knot.
Overcast, mild, no rain, and the canal doing steady weekend business. Two boats came through the lock while I sat, and both crews nodded, which is the towpath way — nobody asked about the boot and nobody needed to. The pencil half of the notes covers the photographs and it's the faintest part, but I can make out 'taken' and no complaint after it, so I'll say they were taken and leave their fate honestly unrecorded. A boot on a lock beam, a dead pen, and two nods. Some entries give you more than you went out for.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.