This is one I remember without needing the notebook, though the notebook is why I remember the half of it, so it gets a proper write-up. Sixteenth of September, 2012. That were the wet year — the wettest summer I've known, page after page of rain noted plainly — and then this one still morning in the middle of September, like the weather had stepped out for a minute. Number 37. It's the entry where the biro gave out, and I'll come to that, but the shoe comes first, because the shoe were the better of the two.
Left shoe. Black, smart sort. Leather sole, laces tied. It were lying on its side on the towpath below Titanic Mill at Linthwaite, which is how I come to see the sole at all, and I'm glad it were, because that's the first time what a sole were made of ever went in the register. I'd noted a sole coming away earlier that same year, but that were condition, not material. This one made you look at the thing itself. A stitched leather sole, heel barely worn, and a line of polish still holding on the toe under the dew. Most of what I document is trainers and work boots, honest footwear that's done a job. This were a shoe that had been somewhere with a carpet. Laces tied an' all, a proper bow, not a granny knot. A different class of find, and I gave it the time it were owed.
I were partway through the notes when the biro gave out. Halfway through the word laces, as it happens — the la in blue ink, the ces in pencil. I carried a pencil in the bag then same as I do now, so there were no drama about it. I finished the entry standing where I stood, weather and all, 2012 being the first full year the weather went in, and the notes don't read any different for the changeover except in the colour. The shoe deserved better than a dying pen, a shoe like that, but the pen weren't to know, and the pencil stepped up. The rest of 2012 is pencil from there to December.
The notebook says still morning, mist on the water till ten, and that's all it says, because in them days that's all an entry needed. What I remember — and this is memory, not notebook, so take it accordingly — is the mill coming out of the mist floor by floor as it lifted. Titanic Mill is six storeys. You could stand on the towpath and watch it arrive, top down, a floor at a time, until the whole thing were there. I stopped on till ten to see the last of it go, which is how I can tell you when it went. No photograph. I couldn't tell you why not, and I've regretted it since, because the light that morning would have suited the subject.
Transcribing now, fourteen years on, I'll note summat about the notebook itself. The ink pages from the front half of 2012 have gone ghostly — you can still read them, but you're reading where the ink was more than the ink. The pencil, from halfway through laces to the back cover, is as clear as the day it were wrote. You'd have thought it'd be the other way about. The word laces is now half of each: the la fading, the ces holding firm. I've not gone over the faint bits to freshen them up. You can't interfere.
So that's number 37. The best-dressed shoe in the register to that point, and for a good while after — nowt matched it for smartness until the brogues started turning up years later. It got half a biro and the sharp end of a pencil, and as things have turned out, the pencil were the better half. The record of it will outlast most of that year, which is no more than it deserved.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.