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For several years, I've completed a Writing Challenge with many people all over the globe. We write something inspired by prompts for 21 days, plus an introduction. This year, the prompts are about place, and I've chosen the River Porter in Sheffield.  These posts touch upon the river's history but they're also about what it means to me.  I'm not following the river in any order except that the first 10 posts are about the Porter Valley and the second 10 posts are about the Porter in the city.  I hope readers will participate and I have a couple of challenges; see the paragraphs in bold towards the end.

There is an exercise, common to personal development courses, where we are invited to liken our lives to a river.  We obediently draw a wavy line on a large piece of paper and mark one end as birth, presumably the river's source.  This river notionally terminates at whatever stage the present day has led to.  I’ve never seen a diagram with death at the far end, probably for logistical reasons.

I suppose this is what I’ve been doing with this series of posts.  Replacing the wavy line drawn on paper with a real river.  This has a few consequences that make a difference.  One obvious difference is that my life does not order itself neatly from source to confluence.  Each personal story draws me to a part of the river in an arbitrary way.  But then I’m not convinced life is ordered in the neat way ordained by the paper exercise. 

The river is a metaphor for my life and perhaps my life is a metaphor for the river, if we allow that it lives its own life.

Another difference is that the river has a definite end.  So do I but I don’t know when or where that end is.  I do know where the Porter ends, if it can be said a river ends.  The river ends in confluence with the River Sheaf under Platform 5 of Midland Railway Station.  The photo shows the river's final few yards as it disappears beneath the station.

Can this be likened to death?  It isn’t the same.  The water is renamed as Sheaf until, in its turn, it flows into the River Don.  All those banks, beds, culverts, and channels are still present.  Rivers are not like us; they persist, slowly changing, forever the same.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to see the river as companion rather than metaphor.  We run or walk alongside each other on and off.  Downstream of Hunters Bar, the land is flat, slightly tilted, so the river knows where to flow next. 

There’s history I learn about as I trace and study its story.  There are 12 dams downstream of Hunters Bar. All but one long gone.  Layers of later history on top, a palimpsest, each layer erased and written over.  Compared to upstream, where 6 out of 8 survive. 

Some street names recall the old dams, Sylvester Street or Stalker Way.  I strive to piece together this history of a river, a city and a life.  And as we step further back, before the dams, before the castle, before Sheffield – what do we find?  This is the Porter’s dream time, a time for imagination.

How might posts of this type be used for marketing?  Think about how you might use this post or a post like it to promote your business.  I add a few thoughts after each post, like this:

This post may seem to be reflective but you don't have to accept that.  Mostly, when we tell stories based on life experience, we simply recount what happened.  This works for many stories but there are alternatives.  To ask a question like: What does this place mean to me? is to bring context into experience.  It doesn't have to be a place, it could be objects, music, books - to begin with something external to us is to open new insights.  Why bother?  You aim to attract attention and hold it until you get to your call to action.  If your story is "like no other", perhaps the reader will read on.

My other challenge is for Sheffielders.  Do you have anything to share about the Porter?  Your experiences along it, bits and pieces of history you've uncovered, folklore you've heard?  If you remember something, please share it in the comments.  (Or maybe you are more familiar with other rivers in Sheffield, you could share those too.)  Let's see what we can find out over the coming weeks.

This is the twelfth of 21 stories about the Porter.  The last story was: A Silver Gatehouse.  The next is: Ain't it Grand to be Bloomin' Well Dead!

Here are the last few yards of the Porter as it disappears beneath Midland Railway Station.