The one-minute muse: artistic inspiration and "love at first sight".

Picture the scene. Oh, you don't need to; there's a photo. You know the general scenario. Shubs is sitting in a pub garden with a friend. Autumn is generally happening around him. There's a pint of ale on the table, The Remains of the Day in his hands, thick woollens protecting his paunch, and it's one of those days where one can tell that the warm winds have been elsewhere before here. For a young man made almost entirely of Autumn, brown and 100% organic wistfulness, this is pretty stirring stuff.

And then she arrives. Gliding towards the tow-path at a breakneck crawl, Lief, a lovingly-battered narrowboat, arrives alongside the pub. And at her helm is yet another she; a nameless girl with autumnal hair, a green wax jacket, a blue patterned Christmas jumper, and - obviously - her own sodding canal boat!

Whilst she potters with porta-potties and rubbish, Shrubs is having a mighty swoon-attack. Inarticulate and now unconcerned with the fate of the fictional Stevens, he stares at the boat and its young captain in wonder. Conjecture erupts at the table. Is she alone? Is this her life? Is she actually real? The piles of gnarled wood and a solitary bicycle suggest a well-planned lifestyle. An ingenious and courageous solution to costly London housing. She; a girl of unfathomable independence and spirit. And Shrubs... no, I, fall in love. Here's a girl carrying her life with her. Here's a portable metaphor for the person she must be. Here's a rich vein of inspiration arriving in the midst of many of my favourite things . With my flu-addled brain already in suggestibly woolly mode, here is - essentially - the moon on a flipping stick.

She's now motioning to move, and I leap up. I wander over, smiling but nervous, to ask a few questions. She smiles back. She has a friend who's elsewhere, but it is her boat. Donated by her father. She's working in London. She's come all the way from Sharpness, Gloucestershire, and yes, she is real.

I daren't ask her name, and simply wish her luck. I watch in wonder as she expertly casts off, leaps gracefully from bank to boat, and disappears from my life forever.

So, yes, I fell in love again this week. And she's gone. But the moment...

Why "Gloucester Shrubhill"?

Suitably toasty by the fireside? Then I'll begin. In ye olde distant days of tautological yore, I was a young idiot with a vague ambition to be creative. I wrote things, and sang things, and sketched things; I even invented my own language. I was a dreaming loner called, er, Joe.

There's nothing wrong with the name Joe. It's common and inoffensive. Joseph even has a Biblical authority to it. But I've never seen Joe as the archetypal artist's name. It has little passion in it, little verve, little bounce. It's a little too ordinary. So I was a dreaming loner looking to distinguish myself with a more artful name. A name of mirth and gaiety, as English as West Country hillsides and as imperious as a Winston. And then I travelled past a railway station:

Worcester Shrub Hill, just another stop on the mainline from Bristol to Birmingham.

I loved it. It had nature, it had history, it had Wodehouse (in Wooster), it had a little thicket on a mound just like in The Animals of Farthing Wood. And then I half-forgot it.

Gloucester Shrubhill was the name I chose some months later. It might have been the creeping and perfidious influence of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester and later Richard III: Prince-killer. It might have been my poor memory. It might have served me right for being a pretentious arse.

But now I've grown into it, and in humbler times I rather enjoy sporting a name that is essentially a testament to my folly; a mistake to be celebrated. And the irony of it all is that when I do eventually submit writing to anyone, it's always under my real name, because I see now that hiding behind a façade is the antithesis of authenticity. And so Gloucester J. Shrubhill is simply a comfortable vestment; a robe to be worn when I feel in the mood. In the end, as it were, Peter Parker will always be the real truth.

Don't listen to idiots signing e-petitions: Joseph Blurton vaguely elaborates.

Late last night I posted a light-hearted e-petition,

Don't listen to to idiots signing e-petitions,

mainly because I was bored, but partially because my woolly little liberal heart was angered by the stupidity and bastardishness of some of the other proposals. I'm a democrat, at least on paper, but I've never believed in the idea of direct, virtual democracy. Just what happens in the modern age of fascists, trolling, unicorns and lolcats? Either idiots calling for the abolition of everything fun, nice and (small-f) fluffy, or idiots like me calling for the abolition of other idiots.

Now the petition has been quoted on the gloriously witty tech-site, The Register, and other blaggers have been mentioning me by name via either disgust, faux academic analysis, amusement or misplaced reverence. Like me, these are all idiots. What we think really doesn't matter!

But if I can find it, there is a serious point to be made. In my discordant philosophy, I believe we need politicians to be leaders, and not just ostriches (see struthiocracy) who'll blindly follow the ill-informed will of the people. MPs should be so much more. They should be accomplished, knowledgeable people who do the governing so we don't have to. I'm an idiot, a lazy one at that; I can't be bothered to read Hansard or sit on the Select Committee on Statutory Instruments. But to some of the posters on HM Government's e-petition's website, using a statutory instrument sounds like the sort of thing you should be hanged for.

This all reminds me of the Democrabus in the BBC's brilliant Absolute Power. A gimmick dreamt up by PR people. "Come up with an idea and win the chance to hear us to talk about it for an hour!"



I'm not trying to be clever (I am, after all, an idiot who voted Lib Dem at the last election), but if we can't mock the system, then the system's worryingly wrong.

Message falters.

joeblurton*at*hotmail*dot*com.

AV: a failure by any other name would smell as sweet.

I haven't posted on this blog for yonks, and there's a reason: this last year in politics has left me feeling uneasy, out of my depth; lacking in the surety of my previous convictions. If that's what the coalition did to me, then imagine how Nick Clegg must feel.

Joining the Labour Party wasn't a panacea; it was merely me sticking to a rather outmoded view that I simply had to belong to a party. I had to pick a side. By temperament I'm probably more suited to joining the Greens. But the reason I did not do just that, the reason I felt compelled to join an Umbrella party, and not one tailored my actual ideals, is because of First-Past-the-Post.

For the Greens could never succeed with the current electoral system. Nor could, I realised, any third party gain the ascendancy and effectively influence national policy. It's a frustratingly chook-and-egg thing. With FPtP, short of a seismic shock in our society as happened in the 1920s, we're condemned to repeat the foetid metronomic cycles of Tory, Labour, Tory, Labour, and the governance of the country will continue to stagnate, with successive parliaments simply skirting around the edges, pandering to a small "c" conservative demographic in the key marginals.

I've held to this belief for a while. In fact, it was one of the key reasons I aligned myself with the Lib Dems from my teens. As an enthusiastic and hopefully well-informed student of politics, it's my view that in order to make Government more responsive, more radical, more exciting even, then we need electoral reform. The additional member system is my preferred option, but it isn't on the table. What is, the "miserable little compromise", is none-the-less a bold step in the right direction. It would force PPCs to campaign for the majority, not those same lucky swing voters. Voting could become about ideas rather than tactics. So the reactionary charge that this vote is trivial doesn't, in my view, hold up to scrutiny; a "yes" vote has the potential to reshape political discourse for the better, even if the campaign itself has been grubby and embarrassing.

But it's now all academic. The vote will be lost. And still, I don't mind. Holding my polling card in my hand today felt exhilarating. After ten years of wishing for the very chance, here it was. The long road to some sort of opportunity to make the case for progress is at an end, and it still feels satisfying. The whole debacle, the coalition and this compromise, have wrecked the Lib Dems for a generation, but at least they gave us this moment. So thank you, Nick Clegg. It's the last time I'll say it.

How I was wrong...

It's taken a while to work up the courage for this post. I spent a lot of time in the run up to the 2010 General Election trying to convince others to vote for the Lib Dems as a vote for change. And look what happened.

There's an argument that's been whirling around my head that if more people had voted Lib Dem, the current situation would be different. But the swing required would've had to have been enormous. No, there's nothing for it but to apologise for being wrong. For believing that the Liberals were different. All it took was the warm leather whiff of those Ministerial Jaguars, and they were as sordid as the rest.

That's not to say the party is evil, or corrupt, or that its heart is at all in the wrong place. But its leadership has been lead down a very dark path for the sake of "growing up as a party". If growing up means abandoning your principles and breaking your promises, then I - for one - prefer opposition.

Which is why I joined the Labour Party. N'uff said, I suppose.

Alien

The Week in Miscellany: Coalitions and Cabbages

I was so sorely tempted to blog in full about the Coalition last week. So many on the left seemed to be panicking as if, as Charlie Brooker humourously puts it, the Tories were blood-curdling Vampiric sadists. We all know a few Tories who are just that, but much of the party's recent rhetoric seems to be aimed at a more centrist audience. With the Lib Dems on board, I'm confident that there will be some sort of beating socially-centred heart in Government. Immediately they're making pleasant purring noises on civil liberties, the environment, and lifting the poorest out of taxation. I'm not saying we should trust them forever, but we should give the Coalition a fair wind. See where it takes us. At the very least, for now it's a refreshing breeze.

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On the allotment front, I want to tell a cautionary tale about the dangers of May. It's all balmy and lovely for a bit, and your sprightly Runner Beans have been doing well on the patio for a couple of weeks. "Allotment, ho!" you say, and dutifully head off to erect some sort of weird bamboo clambering frame for them. And then it happens. May happens. Duplicitous, frigid May. With its snap frosts and consequently withered Runner Beans. Do not trust it.

Other than the Runners, everything's rather rosy in Xanadu (for that, sadly, is the working title for my little patch... don't worry, the shed's called Dave); my fruit bushes are becoming more bushy with every rainy day, none of the mail-order Artichokes or Asparagus crowns have failed, and there's a gradual feeling that the beastliest of the weeds are being tamed by my stern hoe. In short, it's becoming a garden. And it pleases.

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Now! Word-gripe of the week! This time it's the turn of "progressive", which has become so meaningless in the last few months that even David Cameron dares use it. We'll see on that front, but for me this election campaign was the moment when zeitgeisty "progressive" joined the pile of other meaningless campaign words.

So, that updated list in full: sustainable, fair, change, progressive. It'll doubtless grow...