The world fragmented into a trillion predictable pieces that strung out in the depths of my buzzing brain made some kind of brutal sense.

I flipped the Yamaha up a gear. The front end crashing down as the power dipped, the bars twitching in my hands and suddenly the whole bike wobbling wildly as the road surface became a series of craters. It was amazing what neglect and an excess of cages could do to a concrete surface in the shortest space of time – I was damn sure it wasn’t that bad yesterday.

Speed through it, a little voice in my brain shrieked defiantly. Throttle to the stop, the wobbling front end rearing so viciously that it obscured forward motion; the torque of the engine translating into backbreaking, arm-stretching acceleration that tried to knock my eyeballs out the back of my drugged head.

My vision went fuzzy with the rush of blood to my brain as I went flying backwards towards the horizon. The vibes from the engine transmuted into eardrums that popped from the sheer violence of it all. Those drugs, man, they amplified every sensation way beyond sanity.

The back end dug into a huge crater, the bike veering crazily sideways. I fought the bars with magnified muscle, a concoction of strength borne of prettily coloured tablets and the sheer, sudden desperation of my situation; swung my body in the opposite direction hoping to achieve equilibrium, finally slamming shut the throttle before the bike looped the looped and I dug a hole in the ground with my head. To no avail…

The Yam gave a final, desperate shrug, careered sideways. Instinctively, I kicked out from the machine before we went horizontal, shooting sideways, my feet snapping free of the downward projection of 250lbs of heaving steel, alloy and plastic.

The following moments by far the most dangerous, the real damage in most motorcycle accidents coming from the machine slamming into the rider; an easy trip to oblivion or vegetable status before you even know what’s hit you.

The resulting vectors of forward and sideway velocities could’ve hammered me into the tarmac at an angle and momentum sufficient to break my back and tear my limbs off, only I went with the flow, rolled several times before I bounced on to the pavement. Roll, baby, roll!

Turned the remaining momentum into an almost artistic leap to my feet. Staggered, held my balance and screamed with the sheer joy of still being alive and in one piece; rammed my fist in the air at beating the odds. Again! Narcotics exhumed from my body by the roller-coaster shock of it all, a rare moment of stone cold sobriety.