About six or seven years ago I was riding my scooter down the highway and had a collision with a car. The driver tried to cross the dual carriageway without checking to his right first. It was not quite a head on, but my scooter was firmly wedged under his front wheel and I was thrown through the air, clipping the top corner of his windscreen and tumbled through the air and bounced down the road.

I won’t say it was graceful, it was probably more pathetic in terms of its gymnastic qualities, but all in all, I finished up with a beaten up knee some sore ribs and a bit of mental bruising. When you are beetling down the highway at the allowed speed, you just don’t expect to have a car on the left of the road, pull out straight across you.

A hospital visit and a few months of physio and my body was set to healing, but my mind was struggling. With my leg in a brace I could not ride so I became a passenger in my bride’s car. I feared every parked car and every merging vehicle, particularly those that may not have followed the prescribed best practice for merging. I quickly became a screecher as I loudly abused drivers to the left and right at every intersection. At my bride’s behest I got some counselling.

At the end of the first visit with the counsellor we had pretty much dealt with the stupid driver and the accident and then for the next five weeks we set about putting the rest of the world to rights. My family, my workmates, my history, the whole bag of cats I had whirling around in my head. It was the most relieving process. The expression “a weight off my shoulders” has never been more solidly true.

It took several more months of thoughtful consideration before I can truly say that I had most of my demons sorted, but it was only six visits to the counsellor. I would not hesitate to steer people down that path for help. For me, that nasty road accident gave me the opportunity to alter the path of my life.