Xander had always heard terrible things about the cold and damp weather of England, or the stiff and unflappable attitude of its inhabitants, or the tendency for facilities and luxuries of the country to be behind the rest of the civilized world by a generation. He found none of this to be true. Granted, Westbury England was a bit smaller of a town than Sunnydale, but it wasn't too far from London. In fact nothing seemed too far away from everything else in England. Well, except for the winding roads and the riding on the wrong side of the road and that perpetual fear in the more rural parts of the country, of being stopped by a goat and sheep crossing in the middle of the afternoon, but that didn't happen too often.

And at pubs he'd often find himself to be the life of the party. An American with an eyepatch and an admittedly eccentric disposition, although mature for his young age and a seemingly instinctive ability to hold his own in any argument or scrap, and he'd actually shared in a couple few of those in his recent time across the pond. He'd never started one of course, but he did finish a few, often with a firm but measured hand and a few choice words to both parties. Xander Harris had actually made a bit of a reputation for himself in Westbury among the commoners, and he was only partly aware of the full scope of that reputation.

The ladies? Oh, the ladies of Westbury England were smitten by the lad. Again, this was mostly something oblivious to Xander, who had turned his blind eye towards entertaining such notions. He was polite and never rude, although occasionally crude, and cryptic. He tried to keep the ladies at arm's length, which only made a handful of the local available Westbury girls want him all the more. His aloofness was not intended as honey, but it attracted more than it repelled. So on more than one occasion he'd found himself the life of a night's carousing, learning the local songs and both aged and modern parlance.

How Giles envied him. Or was it admiration? Scorn? A combin