I was woken from my early-evening doze in a rather unceremonious manner, as the bus driver’s dulcet tones overrode my iPod’s rather more appropriate offering of Thelonious Monk, to inform me that my transport home was stopping about a mile and half short of my home, rather than more or less outside my front door, as had been advertised when I got aboard and paid my shiny pound for the priviledge of travelling by London Omnibus.

I was, as you might imagine, more than a little put out with this. It substantially cut down my chances of getting the dinner I wanted from M&S from one thing, to say nothing of having been stiffed out of a quid by London Transport. And it looked like it was about to piss down with rain, like it had all the rest of the day.

So it was with uncharitable thoughts about the world and everyone in it that I set off on my impromptu forced march – I had ten minutes to cover about half that distance, and get to M&S before it shut, and if it hadn’t started to piss it down by then, cover the same again to get home. Well, OK, if had started to piss it down, I wasn’t going to be in as much of a hurry, but it was going to be unpleasant.

Thanks to an astonishing turn of speed, I made it to M&S (undampened by rain) in time to grab my dinner, noting as I dived in that there seemed to be an awful lot of police about.

I left M&S, still in a foul mood – they hadn’t had what I wanted, so I grabbed a quick sandwich instead.

At that point, I saw the cause of the cancelled bus, and the police. There’d been an accident, and the police were sealing the road off in both directions. The accident had involved a motorbike and, I think, a bus. It did not look like the kind of motorbike accident that the rider walks away from with scrapes.

I made it home unrained on.

A little lesson in perspective, I think. If the worst I have to complain about is an unplanned brisk walk, and the fact that the rather nice dinner I had wasn’t the rather nice dinner I’d had in mind, I’m think I’m doing pretty well.

I hope that the poor bastard on the bike recovers.