Last week I told of my near-encounter with Patrick ‘Jean-Luc Picard’ Stewart of Star Trek: The Next Generation – not at Farpoint,[1] but in an Italian restaurant in Shad Thames back in 2011. This anecdote then acted as a springboard for an account of my on/off relationship with new Trek in the 1990s and early noughties, which – by the time I returned to these shores from Italy in 2008 – had seemingly withered on the vine.