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.