A still August morning at Lock 42E on the Narrow Canal, Marsden end, with the water like glass. Them mornings are worth getting up for whether there's a shoe or not, and on this one there were: a right boot, black, laces in, on the beam side of the lock.
The notebook describes it as 'good condition apart from the left one being absent, wherever that is', which reads odd until you take it as I meant it — the boot itself were sound, and the only thing wrong with it were that it were alone, same as every shoe in this register. I'll have thought that were a tidy way of putting it at the time. I'm not sure it is, but I transcribe what's written.
Flask conditions good. Egg and cress, 'for a change' — Our Linda varies them and had varied this one. I sat twenty minutes, which the notebook records exactly, and twenty minutes by a still canal with a sound black boot and an egg and cress sandwich is a morning I'd take again any day of the week. No stool yet, mind — that were still the best part of a year off, so I'll have sat on the lock beam or stood. The notebook doesn't say which and I couldn't tell you.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.