'Twas a dark and stormy night

'Twas a dark and stormy night.

Really.

I mean it really was a dark and stormy night. We had headed out after the sun went down and it was rainy and the sky was grey so it can be accurately and justifiably called a dark and stormy night.

Dark and stormy it 'twas when, suddenly, a black shape came out of the darkness.

It was not a Romulan war bird, or a Klingon bird of prey, or even a Borg cube. No, of all things . . . it was a truck.

A truck whose driver had apparently not noticed that the Enterprise had come to a stop behind it as we were all waiting at a red light. Said driver decided to all of a sudden back up (why you may ask? Could it be he wanted to straighten out? Caprice? He dropped his chocolate bar beside the gear shift and accidently shifted it and then stepped on the gas while reaching for the bar? Or maybe he was a mustachioed villain who actually saw the Enterprise and let loose an evil chuckle before stepping on the gas? We shall never know). Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Enterprise, though she fought valiantly, was crushed in the onslaught. The force of the truck was too much and the Enterprise gained a hood with a somewhat accordion-like appearance.

Though actually the funny thing is that the Enterprise was already on her last legs. The transmission had been making rather alarming noises for the past week and the mechanic had informed Emily that it would die very soon. Therefore, the run in with the truck, while cosmetically damaging, was not what did her in.

So yes, this is all leading up to the news that the Enterprise has passed on.

It is no more.

It has ceased to be.

It has expired and gone to meet its maker.

It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace.

It has shuffled of this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

It is an ex-car.

It served Emily and I faithfully for the 8 months that it was in Emily's possession and we shall miss it sorely. (And sorely I mean, walking for half-an-hour home laden with groceries does no favour to ones feet.)

It's send off was rather less grand than its name deserved. I imagined in my mind something similar to Spock's funeral in The Wrath of Khan. Salute. Bagpipes. Speech.

Instead, it sat sadly in our driveway for a week or two before the garage man came to take it away.

Thus ends the era of the Enterprise.

P.S. Many thanks to Monty Python and the Parrot Sketch without which certain extremely moving lines could not have been written.