Last Tuesday I rode my motorcycle into the office as usual. It was cold but not unusually so, and the weather forecast said there might be some rain but that was all. A little before I left for home in the afternoon I checked the weather forecast again, as I usually do in the winter. It said that it might rain, which didn’t surprise me much.

Anyway, I set out for home and all was fine. Up the A41 and onto the M1 at junction 1. A little way up and it started snowing. Really snowing. Before long I was constantly wiping my visor as the huge flakes settled on it and obscured my vision. Looking at the verges I could see that it was settling. Very quickly the road between the lanes started to get slushy.

Pressing on, I got off the motorway at junction 5 and back onto the A41 past Watford. I considered abandoning the bike but it would have been very hard getting home from there and the road wasn’t actually too bad so I kept going.

The slip road onto the M25 was solid traffic. It all crawled along and I crawled with it as I didn’t want to risk riding on the snow and slush between the lanes. The motorway itself wasn’t too awful, and before long I’d reached junction 17, where I leave. The road surface here was bit more problematic as it’s not the busiest of junctions, so I rode down off the M25 very gingerly.

Despite this, just before I reached the roundabout at the end of the slip road, the bike suddenly slid out from underneath me and fell over onto its right-hand side. I said a few choice words then tried to pick it up, only to find that my feet wouldn’t grip and I couldn’t. Fortunately, a couple of people from the cars behind me got out and helped, and soon the bike was upright again.

I was just considering leaving the bike at the side of the road and coming back for it the next day, when a van pulled up and the driver got out and asked me where I lived. Once I’d explained that we were very close to my home, he offered to give me and the bike a lift. After a bit of a struggle we got the bike into the back of his van and set off. It took us a while because of the traffic but we made it and, refusing even a cup of tea, he drove off. What a kind person!

I’d twisted my ankle jumping out of the van, so I spent the next couple of days working from home. It’s still a tad sore but you know what? It could have been a lot worse. On the whole, I was very lucky.