A Ford Sierra helped journalist Anne Cadwallader meet 14 years of deadlines - but it's time to say goodbye
There's an empty space in the garage tonight where Snowy, my trusty steed of the last 15 years, used to take her well-earned rest.
OK, she was a bog-standard Ford Sierra with 175,000 miles on her clock - but she was also a battle-scarred and reliable old friend. Plastic and metal she might be, but she still had soul.
Our relationship got off to a flying start. A letter bearing the good news of my appointment as Northern Editor of the Irish Press in January 1991, included a short clause that a car came with the job.
As my previous vehicle, a 10-year-old Mini, had been flattened by an articulated lorry on the Naas dual-carriageway - with me inside - I was in dire need of new wheels.
But to discover I was entitled to buy a new car, any car, "so long as it's not bigger than Dr de Valera's," was an unexpected windfall.
Knowing nix about cars, and being safety-conscious after escaping the Naas juggernaut, I asked a friend who suggested a Sierra which, he said, was solid, reliable and 'the travelling salesman's friend'. And so Snowy came into my life.
1991 was three long years before the first IRA ceasefire. Journalists have to get close to the story and, inevitably, Snowy began a working life of quotidian drudgery mixed with some narrow escapes.
The Belfast high-rise in which she was habitually parked, for example, was bombed one Monday morning. She would have been amongst the 100 or so cars wrecked had I not decided, at the last moment, to attend a funeral in Co Tyrone.
Funerals, endless funerals, became familiar events in those last few, terrible years when both loyalists and republicans were hurling everything they had at each other. Many's the time we drove away from rural chapel and city church, the sound of tolling bells ringing in our ears.
Snowy also became a regular visitor to Stormont during the interminably boring and inconsequential Brooke/Mayhew talks of 1991-3. She was outside City Hall at dawn in April 1992 when Gerry Adams lost his seat to the SDLP's Joe Hendron.
She helped me move house from north to west Belfast the same year. Then came the 1994 ceasefire and Snowy and I followed the cavalcades up and down the Falls Road.
In 1996, however, it looked as if we might be separated when management at the Irish Press stopped publication. Snowy still belonged to the company - but I reckoned, rightly, they were unlikely to travel north and wrest her from my arms.
Eighteen months later, the receiver and I agreed a price and Snowy was mine, all mine.
Our relationship became really intimate during the long-run up to the Good Friday Agreement. By now I was working for Independent Network News which, because it supplies news to all the independent radio stations, pretty much requires round-the-clock coverage.
By dint of her reclining front seats, and a sleeping bag, I slept soundly in Snowy's arms many nights at Castle Buildings, Stormont, and Hillsborough.
The RUC had to give me a push start one grey dawn, when overnight running of heaters and radio had run down her battery, but she never let me down otherwise. On the morning the Good Friday Agreement was signed, she set off home, obedient as ever, as the snow drifted down.
The narrow escapes continued. I parked her one pleasant summer's evening in Lurgan at a safe distance, or so I thought, from some distinctly unpleasant rioting.
The riot moved. Snowy didn't, and I suddenly realised that the white car being used as cover by petrol-bombers flinging missiles at the British Army was my wee pet. By doubling back and using back alleys, I managed to get to her side. During a brief lull, I leaped into the driving seat and we burned rubber.
Drumcree meant many more night shifts. In 1996, on returning from Armagh during the protracted loyalist shut-down across the North, she took the brunt of rioters on the Donegal Road. Thud, thud, thud.
Her not infrequent journeys to the north Belfast body-shop became more regular.
When the police forced an Orange parade down the Garvaghy Road in 1997, Snowy was within feet of the subsequent riot. I tore back home up the M1 before Belfast went up in flames as well.
In March 1999, I was having lunch in north Belfast when the news that my friend, Rosemary Nelson, had been murdered. Somehow, my hands shaking on the driving wheel, I managed to get Snowy back to the office in west Belfast to file reports.
We were at the Maze jail together in July 2000 when all the remaining loyalist and republican prisoners were set free. We were at Maghaberry jail when Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair was 'un-caged'.
Her labours were not confined to working hours. One weekend, Snowy made an epic journey to Co Donegal, carrying over 80 old, rain-sodden Belfast bricks over the Glenshane Pass in the teeth of a gale. Chug, chug, chug.
The bricks were used to build a fireplace. I think of that nightmare journey every time I lift my feet to be toasted at its flames.
After the official Ford garage on the Antrim Road closed, I began taking Snowy to a mechanic on the Springfield who told me every year that "the old bus" was well past her sell-by date.
She sailed through her MoT test, however, much to his amazement, year after year. Once there was a slight problem but only because an over-zealous mechanic had tightened the brakes too hard.
In 2003, I spent a frantic six months writing a book on the loyalist school blockade at Holy Cross. Snowy took me to many a difficult interview in Ardoyne and sailed down to Dublin for a hair-raising 45 minutes live on the Gerry Ryan show.
Finally, after much coaxing and inveigling from a husbandly-direction (he had bought a red Merc and felt the old Sierra was letting the side down), I psychologically adapted to the concept of letting her go.
When a friend-of-a-friend, who runs a specialist Mercedes garage, came up with the offer of a six-year-old that I didn't require a mortgage to purchase, there was nowhere left to hide. The day had come.
I wasn't going to send Snowy to the dump though. When I confided in a colleague in Dublin that I was looking for a nursing home, he offered to take her off my hands. As he drove her away, I felt forlorn. As a gesture of farewell, he flicked on her hazard lights as he turned the corner. They winked at me jauntily as she disappeared from view.
She now rests, in genteel semi-retirement, behind the locked doors of a courtyard in the Liberties. He's promised to keep her well-oiled and maintained.
No longer will she battle with traffic on the Westlink in rush hour, return home laden with goodies from the supermarket, carry her weary owner home from the gym or gaily sail through Derry on her way to weekends in Donegal.
I've been promised her old registration plates for the garage wall but I still feel as though I betrayed the old girl. Am I a daft old sod? Probably. Goodnight Snowy. And thank you.
Now the confession. The new vehicle, I can't decide between "Black Beauty" or "Sooty", is a revelation. The lads who make cars have certainly moved on. A wee push on the accelerator and whoosh! A twist of the wrist on the steering wheel and round she goes.
At Hillsborough, on her first working day, the cops who usually give me a sniffy "You can't park here Miss", waved me through with a "This way Madam".
Lady Muck in her Merc.