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...

Musings on Storytelling

I have in my mind a fancy. It is probably one of those passing whims which flicker into sight and dissolve as quickly as they came, and yet the idea has a simplistic elegance I cannot help but be drawn to. I should like to tell a story by guiding an audience through different forms of communication, as though the telling of the tale evolves through time in a way that mirrors the evolution of media.

This little journey might begin by a fireside, hearing an itinerant bard tell us of places and people, inspiring us with a sense of bold adventures in a world so very different from the room in which the tale is told. After this intimate introduction in the low, quick-flickering light, the scene would change, and the solitary story-teller would be joined by actors, performing their parts amidst scenery and props, ever-increasing in complexity and detail with the plot.

And then the format might again change, as the soliloquies of the characters transpose from stage to ink, and for a brief moment the audience is reading from a novel, learning from the words more about the characters than they could guess from the actors. In this period we have a window into the motivations of the players, and the message on the page is interpreted privately, in the sacred, solitary act of reading.

By and by, the actors return, but slowly diminish into the background as the pivotal final sequences are played out on a screen, with a scale and grandeur impossible to achieve in the confines of the theatre. The film concludes, the tale is told, and the lone story-teller returns to share a moment of insight with the audience. And he smiles.