Number fifty, and transcribing the notebook now I can see I didn't mark the occasion in any way whatsoever. The entry ends with the word "Noted," same as dozens before it. That sounds about right for me, but I'll mark it here, thirteen years on: fifty shoes.
The fiftieth were a good one, as it happens. Left boot, tan, worker's sort, steel toe by the look of it — I'll have tapped it to check, though the notebook doesn't say so, so take that as memory rather than record. It were sat on the lock beam at Slaithwaite with its laces gone. Still hot, the notebook says, that July being the July it were. A working man's boot on a lock beam on the Huddersfield Narrow. No photograph recorded. If I'd known it were a milestone I still wouldn't have done owt different.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.