Rotten Row - Angela Hargreaves

The story of ROTTEN ROW touches on periods from the nineteen fifties through to the present time and contains tales of love, death, nostalgic regret, sexual encounters, romance, marriage, divorce and desperate times but ultimately how quickly our fortunes can and do change. Rotten Row is about the petty spitefulness and complexity of living in close proximity to some neighbours. To describe the phenomenon that is precisely community with adjoining territories I quote Sigmund Freud, "The narcissism of minor differences." This appropriately sums up ROTTEN ROW. It is a concatenation of all things. Threads that are joined together through accident of time or place. However, the characters in ROTTEN ROW are fictional and many of the things that happen in the book didn't happen at all. I made them up or stole them from the lives of other people that I've met over the years. All have been hugely exaggerated for comic or tragic effect. I had a 'I'll use this someday file' and hoped to one day take advantage of what seemed to me to be a collection of just the sort of comic slightly public episodes that was destined to be used by someone sooner rather than later. My fictitious characters live in the fictional village of Upton Green.