What I’ve learnt since the accident that changed my life forever

In 2011 Jim Moore was knocked off his bicycle by a cement lorry and trapped beneath its wheels. A decade on, the memories of that horrible day are astonishingly real

Moore: ‘10 years down the line one thing I know – life is precious’ (Susannah Ireland/The Independent)

It was when we got to season six of The Sopranos box set that I was unceremoniously shoved into a time machine and catapulted back to a year that, for me, makes the horror of Covid and the rest of 2020 look like a luxury, dream holiday. The episode opens with Tony, the New Jersey mob boss and television legend played by the late James Gandolfini, in hospital, fighting for his life having been shot by his uncle at the end of season five.

He’s hooked up to a ventilator in an ICU with a multitude of tubes spilling from him, just as I once was at the Royal London Hospital. In my case it was after a close encounter with a cement truck, rather than one of Uncle Junior’s bullets. The lorry knocked me off my bike and came to a halt with me trapped under its wheels.

It was only by dint of some very fast action by the London Air Ambulance paramedics and some surgical heroics at the hospital that I’m still here 10 years later. The doctor in the helicopter told me I was the sickest patient he had treated who went on to survive.