This is yet another brief interlude in the infinite saga of our West Coast road trip. In case you haven’t been following, we went from Seattle to Santa Barbara in about 8 days at the beginning of September, and I’ve taken about three months to write about it so far. At the current ratio of holiday days to time taken to document them, LA to Phoenix and back should be down in writing some time in April 2010.

I do, of course, plan to finish rather more quickly. For the sake of my sanity if nothing else.

But that is not why I’m writing this today. The reason for this entry is altogether sadder.

The Troll in the scrapyard

The Trøll pines for the fjords no longer.

I took the Saab for a long-overdue MOT after we got back from the States, and it failed: the brakes were shot, some lightbulbs were out, and the windscreen wipers no longer wiped. Now to be honest, it has suffered roughly the same magnitude of MOT failure every year since I bought it — the brakes in particular are less durable than a cheese & pickle sandwich — but I’ve grumblingly stumped up the cash each time. This year, though, age has finally caught up with the old girl and even if the MOT failures were attended to, the electric windows would still be jammed open by half an inch, the sills would still be rusting and the paint would still be flaking off the bonnet.

I parked the Trøll in the car park at work so that I could think about what to do with it without fear of the DVLA nicking me. “J’accuse,” it said (or the Swedish equivalent), each time I walked past the window to get a coffee.

A couple of weeks later, Mike the building manager started tactfully enquiring as to its disposition. “Is it buggered, aye?” he asked.

I could not disagree. I drove down into Leith, to the nearest scrapyard I could find, and parked the Trøll on the scales. 1,250 kilos; a featherweight by modern standards, and the reason why its quarter-million-mile engine could still move it with a surprising turn of speed when required, and also why the terrible brakes could still bring it to an eventual halt afterwards. I moved it off the scales, handed the scrappie the keys and took the £85 he offered me in return. “It would’ve been a hundred, but we charge three quid to recycle each tyre,” he told me, and turned back to his newspaper.

And that was it. I walked out of the yard, turned to take one last look, and left, saddened.

Postscript: The Trøll’s demise must have been the final straw: now the whole of Saab has gone to the scrappie.

Post-postscript: Now with added pictorial pathos!