LILY LILAC KILLED MY WIFE!!!

LILY LILAC KILLED MY WIFE!!!  There I’ve said it, it’s out in the open at last, uppercase, bold type, underlined, triple exclamation mark.

Who, you may well ask, is Lily Lilac?  Well, I don’t know her personally, I don’t even know if she’s a real, live, living person.  I know her lorries though! While Eddie Stobart is possibly considered the king of road haulage, Lily Lilac and her Lilac Lorries (not to be confused with the big pink trucks of ‘bigpinktruck.com’), be she Lily Lilac the person or ‘Lily Lilac’ the brand, was doing her utmost to become queen (for the record, Eddie Stobart was a real person, ‘Eddie Stobart’ is a real brand).

The green Stobart livery is well known to all of us who drive the highways and byways of this great nation of ours; the lilac livery of the Lilly Lilac’s Lilac Lorries fleet (‘Let Our Lilac Lorry Ladies and Lads Lighten Your Load’ (double entendre hopefully accidental)) is fast becoming a regular sight as well.  For the sake of those who might not know, much of the apparent hubbub surrounding the Stobart company is due to the fact that many of the vehicles within its empire are named with females (one notable exception, for notable reasons, being ‘Lee James Rigby’) such as ‘Maggie May’, ‘Daisy’, ‘Lily Poppy’, ‘Minnie Wynne’ and ‘Victoria Page’ (as in fact, but with no apparent hubbub, are the aforementioned big pink trucks of ‘bigpinktrunk.com, such as ‘Peggy Sue’, ‘Caitlin Dawn Lilly’, ‘Darcee Joyce’, ‘Margaret’, ‘Fenella Mary Jane’ and ‘Fiona Clara’*).

The simple and doubtless ground-breaking premise behind the establishment of Lily Lilac’s Lilac Lorries was the positive recruitment of as many female drivers, Lily Lilac’s Lilac Lorry Ladies as they’re called, as possible, including, and definitely ground-breaking this, those from the transgender community (for the record there were some lilac lads as well; gender equality and all that).  The cheesy and doubtful promotional gimmick of Lily Lilac’s Lilac Lorries was also simple.  First, while driving, you spot a Lily Lilac’s Lilac Lorries lorry; second, using a smartphone, you get the front seat passenger (and only the front seat passenger – nothing illegal here) to record you, themselves and the lilac lorry; thirdly upload the recording via the Lily Lilac’s Lilac Lorries app.  As I said, simple.  Oh, and fourthly, the filming of only one Lily Lilac’s Lilac Lorries’ lorry per day would be eligible and the only way to know which that was would be via a message on the app, a message that would only be triggered should you come in range of that specific vehicle.

The reward for all this endeavour? The chance to win the quarterly prize of a slap-up dinner with the relevant Lilac Lorry Lady (so much for gender equality and all that) for both the car/van/truck driver and car/van/truck front seat passenger, as well as the yearly prize of TEN THOUSAND POUNDS!!!  (Motorcyclists may not enter; terms & conditions apply!!)

Having explained all this, how then, as I firmly and unequivocally stated earlier, did Lily Lilac kill my wife?  This was also simple.

We were heading up the M40 towards Birmingham, keeping our eyes peeled for the road sign announcing the ‘wibbly wobbly bit’ as my wife used to call it, or the merging of the M40 into the M42 as any normal person would call it, when the phone in my coat pocket, a coat flung carelessly onto the back seats, sprung loudly into life, regaling us with an airhorn rendition of what I know only as the General Lee’s car horn in the ‘Dukes of Hazard’.

“What the fuck was that!” yelped my wife, ‘ever the lady’.

“Quick!” I barked back.  “Reach into my jacket, grab my phone and start filming you, me and that lorry.”

“What lorry?” she asked.

“That bloody great purple thing up ahead in the inside lane.”

“I think you’ll find it’s lilac,” she responded, condescending as ever.  “The clue is in the ‘bloody great’ name on the back, ‘Lily Lilac’s Lilac Lorries’.”

“Ha bleedin’ ha.  Just get my phone and start filming.”

“Whatever for?” she queried snippily.

“I might win dinner with the driver.” (Looking back, it was typical of one of the problems in our marriage that I said ‘I might win’ and not ‘we might win’; I really hadn’t planned on bringing her along).

“Why would you want to have dinner with the driver?  For all you know he’s a bald headed, horribly tattooed, twenty stone gorilla with a beer gut, or should that be a ‘greasy fry-up’ belly?”

“For the record, he is a she,” I countered, ignoring her lame attempt at a joke.  “Besides which you’ll get the dinner as well, should I win, not that you need it, and...”

“Oh lovely, I get to watch you slobbering in equal measure over your food and a blonde bimbo with biceps.”

“And,” I’d continued stubbornly, “We can only win if you get my bloody phone out!”

“Believe me dear,” she fired back, (isn’t it remarkable just how much venom can be injected into the word dear?) “I bloody well won’t get your bloody phone out!”

“But we could win ten grand as well,” I wheedled.

“No we couldn’t because I’m not going to do it.  Not for you and definitely not for her either.”

“How typical,” I said.  “You’re so eager to beat me with the stick of me wanting to have dinner with a female, lorry driving stranger that you’ve completely ignored the 10k carrot.”

“Whatever.  I’m still not doing it.  Not for….”

“I’ll do it myself then,” I interrupted, reaching for my jacket, the jacket which still lay carelessly on the rear seats.

“Barry!” she shrieked. “What the hell are you doing, you’re going to make us crash!”

“I’m getting that phone,” I snarled back, stretching further between the seats.

“Stop it Barry!” she shrieked even louder.  “You’re going to get me killed.”  (Looking back, it was typical of another of the problems in our marriage that she’d said ‘get me killed’ and not ‘get us killed’; the fact I might also die bore no relevance).

At that precise moment the car swerved half into the inside lane and straight into the right rear corner of the fucking Lily fucking Lilac’s fucking lorry (I’d say pardon my French but it’s my Anglo-Saxon that makes me ‘ever the gentleman’).  I survived the impact, sustaining nothing worse than a couple of broken ribs and a multitude of livid, long lasting bruises. The Lily Lilac’s Lilac Lorry Lady, a university educated, not overly muscular looking brunette, was left shocked but physically unharmed.  As for Susan? Susan did not survive.  As I firmly and unequivocally stated earlier, Lily Lilac killed my wife.

Much is made of the last word’s spoken between a dying mother and her son, a dying brother and his sister, a dying soldier and his comrades, a dying bomb blast victim and the compassionate but otherwise helpless bystander, a dying wife and her husband.  Much is also made of the tone of the deceased’s passing: she was surrounded by her family; as his eyes closed for the final time, with a voice much weakened by suffering, he whispered it was time to let him go; she softly proclaimed with her dying breath that she would be waiting for him on the other side; he was alive when she left for work; she died peacefully in her sleep; they never had the chance to set things straight; the last communication they had was a shakily written note that read ‘when I get out we’ll go for a drink’, a drink they were never to have.  Thanks to Lily Lilac there was nothing peaceful about Susan’s passing; it was savage, it was instantaneous, it was horrifying, it was undeserved, it was unforgiving, it was unforgivable.  As for the last words she ever said to me: “You’re going to get me killed” ………. 

Shit. Shit!! Shit!!!… I KILLED MY WIFE!

* the vehicle names mentioned herein are, as far as I know, genuine – oh, except for Fiona Clara; I cheated on that one.