The end of an era today , a bit sad but cheerful enough to warrant its place in the Cheerful thread, but maybe a bit long.
Our beloved Berlingo which has travelled from Vigo on the west coast of Spain to Budapest in about as far as you can go in the other direction before getting into trouble, from Malaga in the south of Spain and the nearest you can get to Africa without getting wet, to Inverness, which is not far off how far you can get before tipping into cooler waters, has gone today and left a bare patch outside the kitchen veranda window where it has relaxed for the last 6 months since passing its CT.
Not far mind, about 40 metres by my reckoning to a new master who has been hanging his nose over it for about a year now, When he asked then if I wanted to sell it, I didn’t have the heart to say no so I said ‘only for 2,000 euros’ just to put him off. It didn’t and I could feel it slipping from my grasp. But then he unwittingly threw me a lifebelt, ‘of course, to stay within the law it will need a new CT’ .
I protested, but it still has 6 months almost left on the current one and what if it doesn’t pass, then it will have none, and if it is so serious that it puts an end to the sale, I am left with a CTless car instead of what I have now, a CTed one, I can’t risk that. He thought for a day and came back with a deal. I held up my hand knowing he was going for less but then I knew it would pass and that then I would have lost my car as well as a bunch of money which was there to prevent that. So I said ‘no’, and confessed that I didn’t want to sell it and I only gave him that price to put him off. 
So that was that and last August she (you can see I am really getting sentimental now) sailed through the CT with just a minor blip to fix, the screen washer wasn’t squirting.
But I still have no use for her, her blacked out windows no longer needed for my nocturnal slumbers with canines from Pekes to Danes, even for local runs to the shops, her gearstick is impossible for a one (left) armed driver so I must set her free. She ignores the nearly half million kms on her clock, she kept me warm and stored all my vital stuff in her capacious top of the range cabinets and cupboards. She never complained that I didn’t wash her often enough, that I left gravel and grass to linger in her spacious footwells and she deserves better in her twilight years.
Her life with us started around 20 years ago when she was nobbutt a lass and both Fran and I loved her to bits, but increasing age, even before grievous injury, meant that my left knee and right shoulder could not cope with heavy stop start traffic we were often exposed to.
So where could she go? The grievous injury mentioned above involved me in a very hard fall while walking the dog. My shoulder was dislocated, the attached muscle wrenched and damaged, even now I can’t lift my arm to the horizontal. Not for the first time, my lovely neighbours Marie-Paule and Mario leapt to the rescue. Alerting the pompiers, covering my prone form with a duvet collecting my far spread stuff and looking after my beloved dog.
No way near recovered I then fell again in the house, again stunned and immobile for 20 minutes before I could reach my phone. Marie-Paule was by my side within 2 minutes, Mario only 5 later. They bandaged my head sat me down, checked my vitals (statistics you mucky lot 
) and then M-P started to mop up the blood, she didn’t stop there and very nearly cleaned up the whole house, floorwise anyway. Then making sure I was fine, at last took their leave.
But I wasn’t finished, oh no, a couple weeks later I tumbled again, this time my head was aimed at high speed towards the rock hard double-glazing of the back door. I desperately reached out and grabbed a bush. It was a very prickly bush and it did give me a light landing but took as its reward, half a dozen deep spikes in my hand. I recovered all by myself this time, hard as nails, me, but I couldn’t get the bloody spikes out of my flesh which was beginning to inflate. So this time no call out, this time our brave little soldier made his own way to his private clinic, next door. First M-P, then Mario, wearing headlights and magnified specs, probed, cut away and pulled 'till all was extracted. A quick dose of antiseptic on the injured areas and I was once more sent into battle, with a little help from my 2 friends to mount the slope.
There was a mysterious halt after going not far and they both feared the worst, that my legs had become paralysed. I reassured them by blaming Mario. One bootlace had become undone at some point and Mario was standing on the errant length, I couldn’t move my foot. 
This is becoming all to much I must make a gesture, flowers? Wine? A restaurant meal? Nowhere near enough, what do they want most? My beloved Berlingo of course.
My Grandad, a Master Mariner in the company of many such uncles, grandparents and great grand ones too, had once been shipwrecked off the coast of Spain. Saved, he recuperated in a grand house on the coast where nothing was too much for his comfort and care. He admired the wonderful furniture and ornaments garnered from all over the world until he realised that he was often rewarded with a ‘tis yours’ and he had to suppress his enthusiasm. I often doubted the veracity of this story, taken advantage of, his host could have suffered greatly in their losses, but it did set me thinking.
So back to the Berlingo, it has happy memories for me, with Fran and without her, but it is wasting away there on its patch of bared earth. So I said to them 'If you still want the Berlingo, ‘tis yours, no charge, no price, a cadeau, from a grateful neighbour who knows that friends like you are without price. Only one condition, if you sell it, we split the money 50-50.’ ‘We won’t be selling it’, said Mario ‘and you will see it parked here every day but often it won’t be there, because it will be being useful.’ 
