Another post in a series of nice people!

Dan posted this a while ago and I posted this one yesterday.....and for some reason another nice person popped into my head as I was driving home from work today.

I was in my little white Metro, with Helen, and we were driving up north to Blackpool from Portsmouth to see a show - the Northern Ballet Company's production of Dracula, if I remember correctly.

Anyway, I was used to driving up to the Wirral to see Mum & Dad and it all worked nicely on a tank of petrol. Unfortunately, Blackpool is a bit further north and so on the M55 I looked down at my petrol gauge to see the light on...and the arrow was already most of the way down to the red. Damn! I said to Helen that we needed to get petrol....quickly!

So we turned off the motorway onto a dual carriageway, and spotted a petrol station on the other side of the road. Great, but, then we had to drive up the carriageway, round the roundabout and down back to the petrol station. It was a good mile!

The inevitable happened, we were driving up this side of the road when the the car ground to a halt. Nightmare.

• We were on the wrong side of the road from the petrol station
  
• It was dark
  
• It was Friday rush hour,
  
• and....it was raining.
  

We pulled over to the hard shoulder, and picked up the petrol canister, preparing to walk back to where the petrol station was. Just as we were locking the car, a minibus pulls up behind us on the hard shoulder. A man in his late 50s / early 60s gets out of the bus and asks us if we need help (remember, this was in the days before mobile phones!).

OH MY GOD, we both start to panic a bit, thinking that he's probably some form of rapist or sex offender. Problem is, we really needed his help. So we go into a huddle and decide to accept his offer of a lift to the petrol station, with Helen in the front of the bus, and me in the back holding the petrol canister, poised ready to hit him over the head with it, just in case he did anything dodgy!

We got to the petrol station and got out with a sigh of relief that neither of us had been killed, but we are polite girls and thanked him profusely for his help.

"What do you mean?" He said. "I'm going to give you a lift back to your car".

We were both pleased and terrified - pleased because at this point we were worried about being late for our show, and terrified because we had to go through the petrol can/head/might attack us journey again.

As we travelled the mile and a half or so back round the dual carriageway to the car, we got chatting to him and turns out he drove the bus for the local handicapped club, his wife had died recently, and he was 'keeping himself busy' doing some good things for the local community.

We got back to the car, and he parked the van at a bit of an angle so as to protect us from the traffic whilst I was filling the car up from the can. He drove out a bit into the dual carriageway to allow us to get back on to the road and he also followed us back to the garage to make sure we got there to fill up properly.

As we waved him off, we felt SOOOOOOO guilty for thinking that he was a sex-offender! What a lovely man. He was just trying to help out two girls stranded on the side of the road. He was a genuinely nice person.