Dru, Steinbeck and the Book of Deer

  And so it has come to pass, that just like all the other attempts to get Buffy going again since about 2018,  New Sunnydale has been royally stomped . I'm sorry for Sarah Michelle Gellar but less sympathetic to the rest of you. I was part of an incredible series of events from 2009 onwards which landed me with a vampire flatmate in Partick, an email correspondence with a Buffy cast member, a trek across America to a fateful meeting on Sunset Boulevard, the against-all-odds publication of Dear Miss Landau  and also... I also wrote four novellas about Drusilla, jointly named the Dru Quartet. Two can be found on Archive of Our Own , but the last two have been held back because I believe I found a lost story arc from the original series which was meant to happen but didn't. This is the true continuation of Buffy . At least I think it is. I could put the other novellas in the Archive right now if I wanted, but I don't like self-publishing and I don't want to throw away ...

  Okay, now I've seen everything. Mattel has brought out an autistic Barbie. Sometimes words fail me. This might be one of those times. At first glance, you might think a piece of plastic, complete with dinky little pink headphones, a slightly off-centre gaze, an equally dinky little pink finger clip fidget spinner (what?) and a loose-fitting purple pinstripe dress would make your average battle-scarred autistic adult melt down in Hulk-like rage, feeling like the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune many of us have suffered have been naively trivialised and far too neatly labelled. After all, I've never worn headphones in my life and in fact rather dislike them, can look you straight in the eye, don't even know what a fidget spinner is and don't wear loose-fitting clothes. However, I too am autistic and that's why it's called a broad spectrum disorder. A very nuanced understanding of this is required and it's very often misunderstood. Many of us can scar...

If the UK and the EU don't want to be walked all over, sidelined and even invaded by Russia, we and they had better pull our fingers out, come to terms with raw and unvarnished reality, prepare, rearm and immediately and unequivocally back Ukraine with everything we've got. Britain's civilian population hasn't been directly involved in a military conflict since World War Two. We've forgotten every hard lesson that six year conflict taught us. We've run down the armed forces catastrophically , let NATO fall into disrepair (possibly the greatest mistake my own generation has made) and kidded ourselves that democracy was permanently in the ascendancy. That communism/fascism and authoritarianism was finished.  The Triumph of the West by J. M. Roberts and a belief in the end of history popularised by Francis Fukuyama, founded upon the idea that fascism and communism had been defeated, epitomised this incredible naivety. To explain why I'm talking like this, I...

"This splendid little book." (colophon, Book of Deer) "One of the principal antiquities of Scotland." (Third Statistical Account of Scotland, 1951-1992) The Book of Deer, the keystone around which I constructed The Legend of John Macnab (second sequel to John Buchan’s John Macnab ) in 2015, is a 9 th or 10 th century gospel illuminated manuscript containing the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as well as the Apostle’s Creed. It is also a Celtic work of art. In addition, it has a land grant given by David I to the clerics of Deer and the earliest known examples of Scottish Gaelic annotations. These tell the story of Columba’s legendary journey from Iona to Aberdour (now in Buchan) in the 6 th century to found the Monastery of Deer, later succeeded by the Cistercian Abbey of Deer. The Book, composed of eighty-six folios and measuring about six inches by four in its new 1963 binding, is surprisingly compact. It’s bordered with knotwork and illuminated with d...