This is the entry people ask about when they hear I found a brown boot in Heckmondwike in 2015, the very year the folder opened, so let me transcribe the notebook exactly, because 2015 Keith saw the question coming: 'I'll note plainly this is not the shoe the forum lot go on about. It's a brown boot and it's number 85 and that's the end of it.'
And it is the end of it, but I'll add what the end of it means, writing now. The reports in the folder — and I'm careful even saying this much — didn't match this boot in any particular that mattered. Different descriptions, different sort of location. What I found on the footpath off Walkley Lane were a left boot, brown, laces in, well worn, sat there as plainly as any shoe I've ever recorded. I stood in front of it, I confirmed it, and it went in the main sequence, which is exactly what the other one has never done and is exactly the difference between the register and the folder. One is a book of facts. The other is a folder of reports, and it stays a folder until the day it doesn't.
Dry, mild. Flask conditions good. No photograph noted. I remember being disappointed on the drive home and satisfied at the same time, which sounds contradictory but won't to anybody who keeps records. The folder got nowt that day. The register got a good honest boot.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.