The notebook gives this one a line, same as everything else that year. Right boot. Brown. One lace in. Moor edge. Photograph didn't come out. That's the whole record, and I've copied it into the register exactly as it stands, because that's the rule I've set myself with Notebook 1. But of all the entries in that book this is the one I remember properly, better than some from last month if I'm honest, so it's getting more than a line here. I'll be careful as I go to say which bits are record and which bits are just me remembering, because they're not the same thing and I don't want them getting mixed up this late on.
The record says 30 August 2010 and nowt about the weather, because weather didn't go in the book at all until 2012. What I remember — and this is memory now, not record — is that I'd come up from Meltham way, the road past the reservoir and then the track up onto the edge. I couldn't tell you what took me up there that morning. It wasn't shoes. In them days I wasn't going out looking; if a shoe were there when I passed, it went in the book, and that were the whole arrangement. I'd have had summat to eat in me pocket because I always did, and I want to say cheese and pickle, but the notebook doesn't deal in sandwiches in 2010, so I'll not swear to it.
What I do remember, clear as owt, is coming up over the shoulder of the hill and the light doing summat over towards Wessenden. I've never been a man for describing light and I'll not start now. It were doing summat, and that's as far as I'll take it. None of that is in the record. In 2010 I didn't think that sort of thing were mine to write. The book were for the shoe, and the shoe got its line, and the morning got nothing, and the morning was, as I remember it, worth more than it got.
The boot were on the edge itself, facing out across the valley. That's memory an' all — the notebook says moor edge and no more — but I'd put money on it. Right boot, brown, one lace in; that part's record and it's safe. The facing out is mine. How it come to be there isn't the point of what I do, and it wasn't the point in 2010 either, even before I'd have been able to tell you what the point was.
And then I sat down beside it. Just down on the heather — the stool were years off yet, spring 2016 before I got that — with the flask, which I did have, because I can remember the tea, though what state the tea were in I couldn't tell you and wouldn't guess. I were forty-five, and I'd never sat down beside one before. Up to then I'd stopped, noted, and moved on; that were the shape of it. This time I sat. I stayed longer than the entry suggests, and given the entry suggests nothing at all, I'll say it plain: I were up there a good while. I'll not put a number on it, because the number would be invented, and invented numbers don't go in the register. The boot faced out and I faced out, and the light carried on doing what it were doing over Wessenden, and at some point it stopped doing it, and I come down and went home for me tea.
I did take a photograph, on the phone I had then, which weren't much of a phone. The record says it didn't come out and it didn't — a grey smudge that might be the edge of the moor and might be me thumb. I kept it a while anyway, and then it went wherever old phones take things. There were years when I minded about that photograph more than any I've lost since. I don't mind now. The line in the book is honest about what it knows, and the rest I've carried up here meself, sixteen year, without dropping much of it. It's a crackin' spot, Deer Hill, boot or no boot.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.