Seeking Avalon...

Dear Juliet

I hope you're coping.

I also hope you're enjoying my blogs in the "wee small hours", as the old Scots phrase goes. I couldn't get into church to light a candle for you today but I'll have another go tomorrow. I believe they're open on Sundays.

In the meantime, even in these circumstances, it's nice writing to you again. A bit like that time you were stranded in London with the riots going on. I sometimes think we nearly broke the Internet. I knew it was a very difficult time for you, but I can't deny that I liked talking with you more than I usually did.

Bit of an inversion: I was safe and sound in Roberton, you were in a London which seemed like it was blowing up...

Well, tonight I had too many mochas and too much chocolate. I caught a bit of The Glenn Miller Story with James Stewart and turned into the usual puddle of goo when I saw Frances Langford singing in front of a B-17. My father liked Glenn Miller. He was completely tone deaf but even he could get the beat; and that music epitomised a younger, slightly brash America I really liked. World War Two was terrible, but what a soundtrack...

Particularly In The Mood and American Patrol, I think.

I don't know how much you know about it all, but it's your history. If Dear Miss Landau had ever been filmed, I'd have loved to get a few bars of Glenn Miller in...

Actually, there's a scene from M*A*S*H which might help, but I don't think you're quite ready for it yet.

Anyway, thought I'd divert to familiar themes for now. I finished writing Dru after Graveyard of Empires, but in the last couple of years my subconscious coughed up a couple of ideas. I'd given her the best ending I could, but she was/is kinda stuck in paradise for eternity...

She's managing, but she's a little reticent. She does her job in Avalon, lives in the house on the hill but can't forget Xander. And one day she's walking down to the harbour, someone puts an old 45 on an antique record player, she hears the lyrics and completely comes apart. The local librarian sees her bawling her eyes out and tries to help. She doesn't exactly rebuff him, but doesn't really want to get involved.

But he perseveres. She sees him one night and clutches her purse nervously. He finds her in a restaurant which does special vampire-themed dishes and asks her out on a date. She's reluctant, but begins to thaw a bit. She decides to let him come along when she exsanguinates a dying buffalo as a favour for the local conservationists and I suppose they form a tentative relationship. I haven't taken it any further as it's just essentially a bunch of images in my head. However, I'd mention I always see Dru with curly brunette hair and, in this case, wearing hippie-style clothes at first and, later a long yellow dress with small ruffles on the shoulders.

Prose in Graveyard suggests some of these looks and attitudes:

"The years had blended together into an easy flow of work and love and carpentry; her old dresses of harlot’s red discarded for vibrant creations of blue and gold and green which made her look like 'a dippy old hippie right out of Woodstock.' Or so Xander would tease her, bringing a flash of gold to her eye and a momentary hint of fang."

And:

"Drusilla had come down from the hill, cleaned the house and found some Vaughan Williams on the digital radio. Nowhere near tired and at home in the night, she stretched out on the baggy old sofa, letting the music wash over her and losing herself in her memories. What had Xander said to her once? 

When a man’s known a great love, Dru, one which he’d have clawed his way across a desert for, there’s nothing can surpass it. Even its memory was more real to me than those flat empty days which were all I thought I had left to look forward to…

She felt those familiar old tears stinging her cheeks again. Silly old Dru, sitting there weeping for a man who’d gone while she should be out there learning to live again, seeking out a new life and new adventures, or so people said to her. But how could she tell them what it was like? She’d found her Galahad against all the odds, and though he’d been taken from her too soon, she couldn’t let him go. His house was still home to his scent and the streets of Avalon still bore the prints of his stride. She couldn’t leave – couldn’t leave him – while there was still the faintest trace of him there. He was her Xander and she loved him.

She curled up in a blanket, lithe as a young woman but old and heavy with memory, and did not see the stranger coming for her, walking up the cobbled sidewalk towards the carpenter’s house."

I understand the current state of the Buffy franchise, but the odd thing for me is that the version of it I created is still as bright, alive and colourful as ever.

But what was the song on the 45 which reduced Dru, like me, to a puddle of goo?

I'll Never Find Another You, by The Seekers. Mum liked them, and I inherited that appreciation. They were said to be "too pop to be folk and too folk to be pop." God knows what modern audiences would make of them as their music hasn't been part of a film soundtrack since 1966, but if that scene with Dru was ever filmed, I'd just say do it and see what happens. It would at least be different...

So I hope this disassociated ramble is of some help. It's half-past midnight as I write and you're half a world away, but I could never forget you.

Not even for Dru.

Love,

James