I always come back the other way, and this entry is the reason I always come back the other way. Going out along the top end of Holme Styes I walked straight past it. Coming back, there it were in the reeds, plain as anything from the reverse angle. A path only shows you half of itself in each direction, and a man who walks a circuit and calls it covered has covered half a circuit. I've held that view a long time and Holme Styes proved it again.
Left trainer, white with a blue stripe, laces in, tongue pulled right out — not missing, pulled out and lying forward, which is a different condition and recorded as such. In the reeds at the top end, wet through, as anything in them reeds would be. Fair condition otherwise. The stripe were still a good blue, which suggests it hadn't been out over-long, the sun being what it is with a blue.
Warm morning and the midges were bad by the water, which the notebook records twice, once in the conditions and once in the margin with some feeling. I kept the sit-down short on their account. Flask conditions fair — I'd overdone the milk, my own doing, and the notebook says so because the register is honest or it's nowt. The photographs came out grainy, but they suit the subject, as my photographs generally do. A trainer in reeds wants a bit of grain about it, in my opinion. Number 299, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't already know what number were coming next.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.