Kept apart from the main sequence · four ledgers · four entries between three of them
The main sequence is the register: every shoe found in the field in Huddersfield and the surrounding areas since October 2009, numbered in order. Most shoes go in it and there is nowt to discuss. Now and again one turns up that does not fit, and rather than force it in and spoil the sequence, I have put it in a ledger of its own with the reason written down.
There are four ledgers. The Wellington Boot Ledger has been going since 2021 and has its own page, so it is only summarised here. The other three all opened in the spring of 2026, within a fortnight of one another, which is a thing I have thought about a fair bit.
I will be straight about where I have got to on the matter. I said in May that a man with too many ledgers is not documenting a thing properly any more, he is just making boxes so he does not have to look straight at how strange it has all got. I meant it and I still mean it. These four stand. I am not opening a fifth. Anything that will not sit in one of them from here on stops where it is, undecided, and I will put up with how that looks.
An Away Fixture is a shoe found outside the United Kingdom. The main sequence is Huddersfield and the surrounding areas, Brighouse, Holmfirth, Marsden, the moors, as far as Skipton at a push. A sandal in Spain is not that. It is summat else.
The entries here are logged in full and they are not counted in the main figure. They do not take numbers out of the sequence and they never will. I were asked on the forum how far is far, and the answer is that abroad is abroad. Egypt is further than Spain and Spain is further than Skipton. Past that line it is all the one ledger, and I am not starting a second one for hot countries.
It does not cover anywhere in this country. If one turns up in Scarborough I will decide about Scarborough when I am stood in front of it and not before.
The boot I saw from the top deck on the bank of the Nile, between Edfu and Kom Ombo, is not in this ledger and will not be. I never got to it. A photograph at full zoom from a moving boat is not a record. It is in the report and nowhere else.
A shoe that were not found in the field cannot go in the main sequence. That is the whole of the rule and there is not much more to it.
The shoe behind the boiler were in our own airing cupboard, in our own house, in a place I were not looking. Huddersfield, aye. Our house has been in Huddersfield since 1987. But it were not in the field, and if I put it in between #318 and what would have been #319 I would have to renumber my own approach to what counts, and I were not in the mood for that and I am not now.
What qualifies: indoors, under a roof, in a building that stops still. A car is not indoors. A car is not a room. It moves about, and a thing that has been up and down the Manchester Road and to the tip is not the same kind of still as a thing that has sat behind a boiler since about 2015. I expect this'll be the only entry. I hope it is.
The statistics page counts two under household matters. That is this shoe and the boot in the boot of my car on 13 May 2026. Only the one of them has a ledger. The other is still undecided and I have left it that way on purpose.
A Return is a shoe I have already logged, found again in the same place, in a different position. All three parts have to hold or it is not one.
It is not a new find, because it has a number already and you cannot give one shoe two numbers. That is not a ledger, that is a mess. It is not nothing either, because summat has happened to it and to say otherwise would be to not say what is in front of me. So it goes in here, against the original number, and the original entry stands untouched.
The conditions are narrow on purpose. Same shoe, same spot, moved. I have walked enough miles in seventeen year to know how unusual that is. It has happened the once.
#274 is not in this ledger. The Rigby trainer turned up again in August 2026 outside a chemist in town, seven mile from the wood it has sat in since 2024. Same shoe, different place, so it fails the rule. I have wrote it in again on this week's page with a line drawn back to the 2024 entry, and it looks like a man has put the same shoe down twice and not noticed. I am going to leave it looking wrong. It is wrong.
The wellingtons have been kept apart since 2021 and there are 23 of them. A wellington is footwear, I will grant you that, but it is working footwear, and a working boot comes off in the ordinary run of things. Mud takes them. Gates take them. There is less to sit with.
They are not numbered, because numbering them would be a decision. They have their own page and I have set out my reservations there and I will not go over them again here.
For the sake of the record, here are some things that were put to me, or that I stood in front of myself, and that do not go in any ledger. I have given the reason in each case. A rule is only worth owt if you can say what it keeps out.
Two more things sit outside all of this and I will put them here so the record is straight. The boot in the boot of my own car, 13 May 2026, has no ledger. It is not Away Fixtures, that is for abroad and this is the drive. It is not the Wellington ledger, it is a proper boot. It is not a Return, I had never logged it before. The nearest is Indoor Findings and a car is not a room. The filing is undecided and it has stayed undecided.
And there were a ladies' court shoe on the carpet of a pub in town on a Friday night this summer that I did not count and did not log. If you know how a shoe come to be where it is then it is not really a find, it is just a shoe somebody has took off. There is no mystery in a pub on a Friday. It were a good one though.