GOOD COMPANIONS AROUND ROTHERHAM

This ebook is a work of fiction. The aim of ‘Good Companions around Rotherham’ is to share personal impressions and inspirations from towns and cities that are often overlooked. I have walked, read, looked, listened, felt, lived or worked within these places. They are places of the imagination and are not defined by the boundaries of local government. They are places experienced through childhood, work, leisure, family, friendship, aspiration and memory. In part, this, and other books in the series are offered as a small antidote to the general degradation of the lives of so called ordinary people.

Good Companions is a title borrowed from J.B. Priestley, who took delight in what we are often told are ordinary places, but through closer inspection are found to be no such thing. Good Companions offer different perspectives, not of nostalgia, but of extraordinary lives and imaginations inspired by apparently ordinary places and their surroundings.

You may have your own companions, your own memories. You may see, hear, feel and imagine these places differently. But, your imagination, like mine, will be selective, mortal, fleeting. Some of the places in this book have already disappeared. Some exist only in imagination. All that is solid melts into air. Time changes everything