It was her pride and joy but now it is nothing more than a heap of twisted metal. One of Huddersfield’s best-known motorcycle enthusiasts has told of her shock after her award-winning show bike was written off in a freak smash with a 30-tonne truck. Martha Herrero-Butcher, 57, narrowly escaped injury after her beloved bike was shunted by the truck and lifted clean off the ground. She has been left “aching all over” and “distraught” after the huge truck demolished her beloved bike. Martha, from Dalton, was riding her Suzuki GSF 400 Bandit along Manchester Road near Longroyd Bridge on the evening of October 3 when the accident occurred. The driver of the Scania truck was waiting to pull out and Martha says he flashed his lights to let her out but then appears to have been distracted. The next thing she knew he had crashed into her. Martha said: “I was just sat there waiting. I’d left a generous gap as always and then all of a sudden I felt this massive jolt. “The bike was lifted up and instinctively I knew the only thing I could do was to leap off. “

People said they heard me scream. He got out of the cab and then got back into it and kept reversing to try and shake my bike off which had got stuck in his grille. The police told me he shouldn’t have done that. “Apparently he told them the sun may have been in his eyes. “I am very lucky to have escaped serious injury even though he was just a few feet away from me when the collision occurred. “It has shaken me up and taken the wind out of my sails. “The police and ambulance arrived and I was to taken to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary’s A&E department. “My vertebrae has been compressed and it has left me in a lot of pain though it is mainly bruising. Fortunately I was wearing all the correct protective clothing. “As for the bike it was my pride and joy and I am quite distraught but it is wrenched out of shape, beyond all recognition. “But I have loved bikes since I was 23 and I will definitely get another bike. I’ll definitely be riding again though it may be a while yet.

“I have another bike that I have not ridden for 20 years, a custom bike, but I need a new engine for it. It’s a low rider custom bike which looks like a bumble bee though funnily enough I was known as The Wasp.” Martha is well-known in Huddersfield thanks to the motorbike shop Geared up at Martha’s in Wakefield Road, Aspley, which she ran for many years. She bought the Suzuki for £2,700 in 1994 and spent a small fortune on having it stripped down and restored. It went on to win several awards in bike shows. Martha added: “This collision is not just about me. I’m doing this because motorists need to be more bike-aware and think about bikes. “And I’d like to say a big ‘thank you’ to the ambulance crew and the staff at A&E who were wonderful. It’s so important that we keep it in Huddersfield.” 13 year wait for damages payout Knife arch to return for Christmas Who made the rich list?There goes another innocent pleasure. Bang (or perhaps that is not precisely the mot juste) goes another freedom.

Last week, the Ministry of Justice outlined a range of proposed increases for magistrates’ fines, including a possible penalty of £2000 for not wearing a helmet on a motorbike. I shall not be directly affected by this threat but am still irked by its intentions. motorbike shop in mordenAt nearly 70, I have finally given up on bikes; motorcycle helmet rental portlandbut that daunting sum of money would certainly have put the tin lid on one of the minor delights of my life - occasionally riding without a helmet on a summer day. lodi motorcycle dealersIt wasn’t even an offence when I began to ride bikes in the 1960s. wrecked motorcycles for sale in colorado

And the trivial penalties that were later introduced reflected the law-makers’ view that it was, at worst, an act of silliness rather than anti-social delinquency. To anybody who has never ridden a motorbike, it probably seems unquestionably clear that, if you’ve got any brains at all, you should protect them with a crash helmet. motorcycle shop shakopee mnI would bet good money that the proposed new fines have been framed by precisely such desk-bound officials. motorcycle shop shingle springsHow would anybody whose main source of pleasure in mechanical motion comes aboard the 07.27 from Weybridge to Waterloo know or understand that riding bareheaded in warm sunshine is a most delicious, glorious sensation; and that it puts you in touch with the machine and the elements as naturally and completely as bare feet put you in touch with the surf board and the wave?

Obviously, whenever I rode without a helmet, I would be wearing sunglasses or goggles to protect my eyes, along with reinforced gloves and boots and full leathers with body armour. I was proud to hold a Gold award on motorbikes from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. Long experience had taught me the risk of eye injury from flying insects and debris. Many painful spills had imparted an understanding of the horrible consequences of coming off a bike if you’re not wearing stout skin covering (most deaths in hospital after bike accidents result from irreplaceable skin loss). The sight of swarms of nitwits riding around towns on scooters wearing what they merrily call "skidlids", at the same time as they are covering their flesh with nothing more substantial than a business suit or a summer dress fills me with dread. They little realise the ghastly risks they are taking. But the likelihood of injuring your head is relatively low (I never did among my numerous mishaps on bikes) and the risk always seemed a reasonable trade-off against the pleasures.

Wearing a helmet on a hot day feels like boiling your brains in a galvanised bucket. It also mucks up your hair something horrible. How can you look like James Dean on his Triumph or Tom Cruise on his Kawasaki Ninja in Top Gun if - when get off your bike outside the girl’s house - you remove your helmet and reveal a pate plastered with slimy thatch? Obviously, you want to see yourself more like The Fonz in Happy Days, flicking a comb through your lustrous locks and shooting the cuffs of your biker jacket before setting about the business of the evening. In all those years of riding bare-headed (I never did it more than half a dozen times a summer), I was spotted only once by police. I had ridden down to the village shop to get the papers on a Sunday morning. The boys in blue drinking coffee in their van in the car-park amiably nicked me, then drove me home in the Transit. The fine was £30. When I told James May how little it cost, he said "It's worth it, isn't it?" When I went to court to pay, I asked if penalty points were involved and the clerk said, "No, because you haven't endangered anybody else."

"Why, then, is it an offence?" She giggled but it wasn’t her job to give a reason. So perhaps somebody ought to ask the Ministry of Justice whether this so-called offence will still carry no penalty points even when the fine is £2000? The narks would say that, if you injure your head in a bike crash, you will be levying an impost on the public purse through your NHS treatment. A lot the narks know. If you come off a bike at more than 20 mph and land on your bare bonce, the resulting mess may distress onlookers and the paramedics who are summoned to the scene; but you're unlikely to be troubling other professionals apart from the mortician and the undertaker. Their services are not usually covered by the NHS. If you are wearing a helmet and you clout your head in a crash, however, you might find yourself (if you can find yourself at all) in quadriplegics’ traction or in ICU for decades. Helmets unarguably do save some lives; but every biker on earth knows perfectly well that a helmet is no less fallible than a condom as protection.