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7thWave AI Assistant

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.

Are rivers permanent?  Well, yes and no, I suppose.  We can’t see back to the ultimate origin of the River Porter but we can imagine that the relatively flat area between Hunters Bar and the River Sheaf, is a result of thousands of years of the Porter doing its thing.

But how far back do we go before we wouldn’t recognise it?  Possibly a few hundred years and we would struggle to recognise it, certainly before the mills.  And maybe we would struggle to figure out where we were at the time when all the lower Porter wheels were extant.

The patch of land behind the fence has the Porter beneath it.   A little downstream from here, behind the photographer, there was the Sylvester Wheel and upstream, the Bennett wheel, beneath what used to be Staples.  This area was culverted in the mid-20^th century and it is a part of the Decathlon car park.  (They’re a big store that sells something or other.)

It appears to be permanent, despite being relatively recent, except it collapsed in January 2017!  So, not very permanent then.  Ironically, it seems the much older bridges (about 100 years older) on either side of the collapse didn’t collapse. 

They’ve mended it and so the Porter’s escape attempt failed!  But they’re not allowing cars on it, so perhaps it’s still a bit wobbly.

This notwithstanding, the Porter hasn’t changed that much over my lifetime, which is 70 years and counting.  But rivers live on a different timescale than humans.  Do they remember what it was like all those thousands of years ago?

Since I wrote about Forge Dam, I’ve found out what Heraclitus actually said.  “We both step and do not step in the same rivers.  We are and are not.”  Hopefully, that clears things up.

This second photo is a tiny bit further downstream.  It perhaps offers some insight into modern culverting …

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:

The landscape around the culverted Porter is not impressive.  The Porter passes under a series of car parks.  It's hard to believe it's the same river as the one that flows through the Porter Valley.  Maybe your clients experience something similar.  Whatever you sell, it will usually work well but occasionally not so well.  This may be the nature of what you sell.  As a marketing coach, whatever marketing strategy we develop, I can't guarantee things will work out as planned.  Outcomes may be success, delayed success or it simply doesn't work.  Usually, strategies need tweaking.  It is rare things work first time.

The key to this is to manage expectations.  Just as the car parks over the Porter may have an interesting history, so we can demonstrate the nature of the problems we wrestle with.  We can use stories of successful and unsuccessful interventions to show what is possible and what is not.  The key is to learn the principles behind our interventions so that we can manage our business with insight.

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 eighteenth of 21 stories about the Porter.  The last story was: Pocket Parks.  The next is: Water Music.

Here's the full picture of the Decathlon car park: