Barry had walked that stretch of towpath the week before and seen nowt. He mentioned it when this one went in the ledger, and we gave it a minute's consideration on the phone: either the trainer arrived in the intervening week, or it were there and missed. Barry, to his credit, allowed for both, and his eye has been good for years now, so I lean towards it arriving after. But the register doesn't record leanings, so the entry says what can be said — it were there on the Saturday, and now it's in the ledger, and the week before is the week before's business.
Right trainer, blue, laces gone but the eyelets intact, which is worth distinguishing — a shoe can lose its laces tidily or violently, and this were the tidy sort. On the towpath by the moorings below Shepley Bridge at Mirfield, wet through, as everything were that morning. Fair condition under the wet. The moorings were quiet, the boats shut up for the back end of the year, water running off their covers.
Rain most of the morning, eased off by eleven, and I'd timed the walk to catch the easing, which mostly worked. Flask conditions moderate — the tea were stewed, and it were my own fault for filling the flask the night before, which I know better than to do and did anyway. The register is honest or it's nowt, and that goes for the tea an' all. No photograph note in the book, and at this distance I couldn't tell you whether that means none taken or none worth remarking on, so it stays unrecorded. A grey entry from a grey morning, and none the worse for it.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.