Right then. A few rules so we all know where we stand.

1. One item per post where you can manage it. It makes the threads easier to follow.
2. A photograph is lovely but it is not compulsory. Plenty of us have no camera.
3. Say where and say when. "Up north somewhere" is no good to anybody.
4. We do not argue about what counts. If it is single and it was left somewhere, it counts on here.
5. Signatures: two lines. I have had to say this twice already and we have only been going a month.
6. Be nice. That is the whole of it really.

Any bother, drop me a message.

Bev

Adding a rule 7 after a bit of unpleasantness this week.

7. Do not post anybody's home address on here, not even to be helpful, not even if they gave it you in a message.

That is all. Carry on.

Bev

Say hello, say where you are and say what you keep an eye out for. No need to write an essay.

I am Bev, I am in Nuneaton, and I do not collect anything at all. I just like reading about it and somebody had to run the board.

Bev

Good evening. My name is Wim. I live in Utrecht in the Netherlands.

I photograph gloves which are found alone. Most of them are placed on railings or on a wall by somebody who hopes the owner will return. I have 212 gloves recorded since 2011. I keep the date, the street, the material and whether it is for the left hand or the right hand.

I hope my English is good enough for this board.

With regards, Wim.

HIYA IM JAMIE IM 15 I DO SINGLE SOCKS OFF THE FIELD BEHIND OUR HOUSE THERE IS ABOUT 30 OF THEM NOW SOME ARE IN THE HEDGE

Introduction as requested.

Name: Keith.
Location: Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
Item: Shoes. Single shoes, in public places. Never a pair.
Since: October 2009.
Number logged to date: 44.
Method: Location, which foot, condition, laces, weather. Photograph where I can manage one. Confirmed by me in person before it gets a number.
Equipment: Notebook, biro, camera, flask.

I have read the rules. I hope the above is the right sort of thing. If it is too much I can shorten it.

Best wishes, Keith.

Welcome Keith. That is far and away the most thorough introduction anybody has given us and no, it is not too much. Most of them put their first name and then nothing for a year.

Make yourself at home.

Bev

January to March. Nineteen gloves.

Wool, red, right hand. Railing, Oudegracht. 6 January.
Leather, black, left hand. Wall by the bicycle park, Lucasbolwerk. 11 January.
Child's mitten, blue, no hand determined. Bench, Wilhelminapark. 19 January.
Wool, grey, right hand. Post box, Nobelstraat. 2 February.

The remainder are in the list attached. February was a strong month. March was poor, I think because it was dry.

With regards, Wim.

January to March. Nineteen gloves.

Wool, red, right hand. Railing, Oudegracht. 6 January.
Leather, black, left hand. Wall by the bicycle park, Lucasbolwerk. 11 January.
Child's mitten, blue, no hand determined. Bench, Wilhelminapark. 19 January.
Wool, grey, right hand. Post box, Nobelstraat. 2 February.

The remainder are in the list attached. February was a strong month. March was poor, I think because it was dry.

With regards, Wim.

My apologies. The page did not load and I have posted it two times. Please to disregard the second one.

With regards, Wim.

17 for the month. 9 in the brook behind the retail park, 4 on Blackburn Rd, 2 in the underpass, 2 in the garages off Halliwell.

the brook ones are the same 9 as december as far as i can tell. nobody has been for them. cheers

I SAW 4 TROLLEYS IN THE CANAL WHEN WE WENT HUDDERSFIELD ON THE TRAIN THEY WERE STOOD UP LIKE THEY WERE QUEUING

Two points.

1. Blackburn Road, not Blackburn Rd. The board is a record and a record should be written out.
2. A trolley in water is not "off site" in the sense the thread title uses. It has been disposed of. Those are different categories and counting them together makes the monthly figure meaningless.

-- Accuracy costs nothing.

fair enough on the road name. im keeping the brook ones in the count though, a trolley is a trolley. cheers

Hello all. I am Morag, I am in Fife and I log single earrings. Pavements mostly, and the bus station, and one memorable one in the frozen aisle at the Co-op.

The question I have is this. Last Tuesday I found a stud with no back to it. Now is that one item or is that half of one? I have been going back and forward on it all week and I would like to know what other folk do.

Morag

Morag raises, I think without quite realising it, the central problem of the whole enterprise, which is that we have never settled on a unit.

A shoe is a unit because it is one of a designed pair. A glove likewise. An earring is a unit of the same order, but the butterfly back is not a unit at all, it is a fastening, and a fastening has no partner and therefore cannot be single in the sense we mean. What Morag has found is an incomplete instance of a unit, which is a third category altogether and one the board has no name for. I would propose we call these deficient instances, though I accept that is not a happy phrase.

I would go further and suggest that until we have a taxonomy of the incomplete, every count any of us keeps is provisional.

G. Beckwith (Dr, retd)

Morag, I would log it.

What I do with mine is put down what were there and nowt else. A shoe with no laces is still a shoe and it goes in with "no laces" written after it. You can decide later whether that category belongs in the main sequence, and if you decide it doesn't you have lost nothing, because the note is still in the book. What you cannot do is go back and write down a thing you never wrote down at the time.

So: stud, no back, date, where, which ear if you can tell. That is a full account in my view.

Best wishes, Keith.

11 so far and it is only teatime. 6 in the bins by the station, 3 on the verge at the ring road, 2 in the hedge on Sandy Lane.

9 of the 11 are the cheap folding sort. Ribs out on all of them. Black, black, black, black, navy, black, red, black, black, tartan, black.

Will go back out tomorrow.

14. The tartan one has gone. Somebody has had it.

I were out in the tail end of that on the Saturday, over at Farnley Tyas. Child's shoe on the churchyard wall, blue, buckle sort, so no laces to record. Logged it.

I will say for anybody starting out that wind is the one weather that beats you. Rain you can work in and cold you can dress for, but wind spoils the photographs and there is no answer to it that I have found in eight years. Two of mine came out of five.

Best wishes, Keith.

Two things.

The board will be off on Tuesday morning while the hosting people do whatever it is they do. They say an hour. It is never an hour.

Birthdays this month: Wim on the 9th and Margaret on the 21st. Many happy returns to the pair of you.

Bev

We are 41 members now, which I did not expect when I started this in my back bedroom.

Can I remind everybody about signatures, two lines, and that includes the quote some of you have under your name. I am not naming anybody.

Bev x

Seen one Saturday by the cricket field at Heckmondwike! Left, dark, laces still in it. My photo has come out all blur again, I am sorry Keith, the light was behind it. I am getting a better phone in June off my daughter's old one.

Sorry. Wrong thread. Barry

Not board business but a few of you have asked.

I am having the hip done on the 26th at Coventry. They say four days in and then six weeks of not doing much, which will drive me up the wall. Our Michael is coming to stop for the first fortnight.

I will still be able to get on here off the tablet so behave yourselves.

Bev x

I want to raise something that has been developing on this board for a year and which nobody has questioned.

1. We have always been a board of things people have seen with their own eyes.
2. There is now a thread on here collecting things people have been told about by somebody else, which sits at the top of the board with a sticky on it as though it were of equal standing.
3. A report is not a sighting. Once the two are filed in the same place the difference is lost, and it is lost permanently, because in ten years nobody will remember which was which.

I propose that reports without a photograph or a named witness are kept off the board entirely.

-- Accuracy costs nothing.

Duncan is right and also wrong, which is the most interesting position for a man to be in.

He is right that a report and a sighting are different in kind. He is wrong to conclude that the weaker should be excluded, because the whole subject we have taken up is the study of things nobody looked at properly at the time. If we admit only the well witnessed we will have a very tidy record of almost nothing. The field notebooks of the nineteenth century are full of hearsay and we are still reading them.

What is wanted is not exclusion but labelling.

G. Beckwith (Dr, retd)

I will answer plainly because it is my thread Duncan means.

The folder is kept apart from the register and always has been. Nothing in the folder has a number. A thing gets a number when I have stood next to it, and if I never stand next to it, it never gets one, and that is true of every report in there including the ones I would like to be true.

So Duncan and I want the same thing, which is that the two never get mixed up. We differ on where the reports should sit while they wait. I would rather they sat somewhere people can see them, because four people describing the same thing separate from one another is worth summat, and it is worth nowt at all if it is in four people's heads.

I will keep labelling them as reports. If the board would rather the thread came down I will take it down.

Best wishes, Keith.

Then we differ, and I do not think either of us is going to shift.

Bev, would you close my account please. I have enjoyed the board and I wish everybody well with it.

-- Accuracy costs nothing.

Duncan has asked for his account closing and I have done it. He was polite about it in his message and I will say that here because the thread does not show it.

Let us leave it there now please.

Bev

I am opening this thread to collect reports of one particular shoe, because they have started arriving from more than one direction and I would rather they were in one place than scattered about.

If you have seen it, or been told about it by somebody who has, please give me:

Date, as near as you can manage.
Location, as exact as you can manage. A road name is worth more than a village.
Which foot.
Condition, laces, colour.
Weather at the time.
Whether you photographed it, and whether the photograph came out.

I am not asking anybody to believe owt. I am asking for descriptions. I have opened a folder and the descriptions go in it, and that is all that happens to them for now.

Best wishes, Keith.

Right Keith here is mine at last!! I have been meaning to write this down proper since it happened.

It was 2014, the back end of the summer. I had gone out for a walk after my tea which I do not often do. I saw it from maybe thirty feet and I knew straight away it was not an ordinary one, I cannot explain that any better than saying I knew.

[Barry's description is taken out of this copy. It is in the folder and it has been read by me a good many times. I do not print it because I do not want to put words in the mouth of the next person who sees summat. K.]

I had my phone but the light was behind it and I have nothing to show you. I have thought about it near enough every week since.

Barry

Barry, thank you. Three questions and then I will leave you alone.

1. Which way were you walking, up or down? People remember the direction better than the spot.
2. Was the ground wet? It had been a dry fortnight in Huddersfield and I want to know if it were the same over your way.
3. Did you go back the day after?

It is in the folder as it stands. I am not marking it as owt other than a report.

Best wishes, Keith.

I have been following the Heckmondwike one with some interest and I want to set down why it is different from everything else on this board.

Every other item we record is an object with a history we cannot recover. This one is an object we cannot reach at all, and what we have instead is four accounts of it. That makes it, strictly speaking, not an object but a piece of testimony, and testimony behaves quite differently. It accumulates detail with each telling rather than losing it, which is the opposite of what a weathered shoe does on a wall.

I do not say this to discourage anybody. I say it because somebody ought to write down what we are actually doing here.

G. Beckwith (Dr, retd)

I would rather it weren't given a name.

Once a thing has a name people start looking for the name instead of looking for the shoe, and then they find summat that fits the name. I have seen it happen with the trolleys thread in a small way.

It is reports of a shoe in an area. That is the whole of what it is. I am not going to fall out with anybody over it but I will not be using the name myself.

Best wishes, Keith.

We had a day out to Heckmondwike on Saturday, partly on account of this thread and partly because Sylvia's aunt was at Batley and we were over that way anyhow.

We walked Green Lane and the footpath off Walkley Lane and up past the cricket field and we saw nothing at all, not so much as a trainer. We had our dinner in the car. We are not reporting anything, we just thought somebody ought to say where they had looked and found nowt, since that is worth knowing too.

Ken and Sylvia, Congleton

Ken and Sylvia, that is worth knowing and I have written it in. A place somebody has looked properly is a place I do not need to look for a while.

For the thread: a second description has come to me by email this spring from somebody not on the board, and it matches the earlier one near enough that I sat up. I am not printing it, same reason as before. That is two now, eighteen months apart, from people who have never met and could not have got it off one another.

I will be going out to have a look when the light is right for it. When I go I will say so here, and if there is nowt there I will say that an' all.

Best wishes, Keith.

I said I would report back either way, so here it is.

Set off half seven. Parked and walked in, about an hour and twenty. In a hollow just below the ridge path there were a shoe. Left boot, reasonable condition, laces present and tied loose. Mast in view the whole time, which it is from anywhere on that ridge.

I stood still a good while before I went near. Seventeen photographs, which is the most I have ever taken of one, and not all of them came out. Then I sat on the stool for over an hour with the folder notes on my knee and I went through it item by item against what is written down. Cheese and pickle.

It wasn't the one.

I have logged it as 121 on its own merits, because it were a shoe and it were there and that is what the register is for. I have not been back up since. I will go when I am ready.

Best wishes, Keith.

Oh Keith. I had a proper feeling about this one all week, I even told our lass on the Friday night.

Still. You got a shoe out of it and seventeen photos and a walk on a nice day, that is not nothing is it. I am glad you went.

Barry

It were a good morning out, Barry, and the boot is a decent boot.

The folder stops open. Nothing has changed about it except that there is one more place I have looked.

Best wishes, Keith.

is anyone still on here. last post before mine was march. i still do the count every month if anyone wants it. cheers

I am still here. I read every week but I do not always have something to add.

Eleven gloves this year to date, which is fewer than last year at the same point. I do not know the reason. The winter was mild.

With regards, Wim.

Still here an' all.

Since I last posted: left boot on the dam path at Scammonden, 30 June, brown, sole coming away at the toe, no laces. Right trainer in the bywash at Butterley on the 16th, white gone grey, laces frayed and the tongue pulled out. Left shoe in a ginnel off Scar Lane at Golcar, 2 June, a work shoe by the toe, laces in, heavily creased.

Post your count, Bolton. I read them.

Best wishes, Keith.

Not being funny but is there a Facebook group for this now? Only I put my kerbside chairs on here for two years and I get more back on a Facebook post in an afternoon than I get on here in a month, and my daughter says everybody has moved.

If there is one can somebody send me it. If there isn't I might start one.

Ann

I am not on Facebook so I would be no use to you, Ann. If you do start one you are welcome to put my website address on it, and if anybody on there sees a shoe they can write to me the ordinary way.

I will keep posting on here. It suits how I do things.

Right boot in Honley Woods on the 8th, black, laces missing, upper cracked across, off the main path where the ground drops.

Best wishes, Keith.

13 April. Left boot, brown, the heavy sort, laces in and knotted. Lying in the heather a few yards off the valley path above Marsden, Wessenden way.

Clear and cold. Flask conditions good. Four photographs, three came out.

Best wishes, Keith.

4 May. Left brogue, dark brown, laces in, decent condition for open moor. On the edge of the track above Meltham.

A good one, this. It had been polished at some point in its life and you could still see where. I sat with it a while. I will go back up in the summer and see how it is getting on.

Best wishes, Keith.

18 May. Right trainer, grey, laces gone. On the beam of the top lock by Tunnel End at Marsden, balanced but sound.

Separately: a letter came this month about the Heckmondwike area. I drove over and had a look at the spot described and there were nothing there, same as the last time. The letter is in the folder and I have written back.

Best wishes, Keith.

15 June. Right boot, brown, laces tied together and looped over themselves. On the towpath edge a mile out of Skipton towards Gargrave.

Skipton is the far end of what I will drive and I want that on record so nobody gets the idea I range about the country. Set off half seven, there by nine, and it were still there, which after four days is never a certainty. Overcast, dry. Flask conditions very good. Seven photographs.

Worth the diesel.

Best wishes, Keith.

13 July. Right boot, black, steel toe by the weight of it, laces in. Against the wall at the field edge below the mast at Emley.

An ordinary find on ordinary ground and I have logged it as one. Warm, hazy, mast wires singing. Ate both rounds in the lee of the wall.

Best wishes, Keith.

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