Me and the wife, Mary, were going on holiday to Eastbourne for a five day holiday. We set off from Todmorton at 10 o’clock in the morning. Got going nicely. It was raining and then it started sleeting.

About 5 o’clock in the evening, with rush hour starting, the driver said “we’re about an hour from Eastbourne so we’ll have a final toilet stop” and he drove up this narrow road to a small service station, where we had a cup of tea. When we came back down we couldn’t move. The traffic had been stopped by the snow. There were cars in front, cars behind but there was no traffic on the other side of the motorway just white snow, because of work being done.

We just had to sit there. We couldn’t move. Then a lady at the back shouts, “Me tablets, they’re in me suitcase” so the driver got out to get her suitcase. I wasn’t on many tablets then, Mary had a few. Another lady, like Miss Marple, said “I’ve just rung the police and told them there are 50 elderly people on this coach, it’s a good job we’ve got a toilet and the drivers said he’s plenty of fuel to keep it warm for us, but what are you going to do? And they said Nothing!”

But two police cars turned up on the other side of the road, blue lights going and two great big gritters come down. I wasn’t sure how they were going to help, but the driver said it looked like things were starting to move.

People had been leaving their cars and going up to the service station to get bags of food. But the lights on car in front of us had gone out and it looked like whoever had been driving it had walked away, so we had no way of getting passed. Luckily a few of the lads working on the other side of the road managed to push it out of our way.

We arrived in Eastbourne at 6am and drove to the Burlington Hotel where there was hot coffee and sausage rolls laid out for us. Mary said to me “sit down” I said “I’ve been sat down all night, I’m going for a walk and I’ll be back at 8 o’clock for me breakfast”.