A shorthand notebook and pen may be the essential tools of any reporter, but for me on Thursday my scooter was at least as valuable. It also gave me a small chance to give something back to fellow Londoners at the end of a shattering but moving day.

For almost 10 years a trusty Vespa has allowed me to avoid the sweaty, dusty and unreliable Northern Line. In fact, I was reminded yesterday that it was an almost deliberate decision after the IRA attacks of the late 1980s and early 1990s which led me to get a scooter to regain a measure of control over my movement around London.

In a city thrown into gridlock, chaos and horror on Thursday, I was at Aldgate Station minutes after the alarm went up. I parked so close to the scene that within a few minutes my scooter – parked on the pavement – was swallowed up within the rigid police cordon. It took some fast-talking with a kindly police officer to get it out.

At Aldgate I interviewed two survivors who just wanted to talk their horror out of themselves, to share the devastation shock and surprise of their mundane journey to work being shattered by terrorism.

From there I bypassed the roadblocks and snarled traffic to get to Kings Cross, then Euston and home to Primrose Hill – stopping regularly to file back to the office. I stopped at home to log on to the internet, file more copy and grab a spare helmet so I could later collect my daughter from her school at the Barbican.

By this time it was raining hard and the newsdesk wanted hospital scenes. Climbing into my wet weather gear, I rode the scooter again up to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, a picture of calm efficiency.

Scootering back to the office I broke every road rule in the book: no buses in the bus lanes of course, but cycle paths had to be used to get around the bomb scenes at Euston, Kings Cross and Tavistock Place. Later, it was with enormous relief I collected my daughter from school, her small arms wrapped around my middle.

But what then? As I dropped her off around 4.30pm, it seemed utterly pointless to just go home. As I rode up the road, I came across a group of weary commuters walking home. "Anyone want a lift north," I said.

They all laughed and declined but the idea was in my head and I rode south towards Euston and the tides of commuters heading in both directions. In Bloomsbury, I collected Christian, a Ghanaian tying to get all the way to Kennington. He gamely put on my spare helmet, climbed on and we zoomed south to Waterloo Station.

"Why do you think they hate us so much? What’s really behind this?" he wondered aloud as we sped down Gower Street to Covent Garden.

On the way back, across Waterloo Bridge, a young woman at the crowded bus stop accepted my shouted offer and we too sped across the bridge and around the chaos of Euston Road to Camden Town.

"It takes something like this for people in London to talk to each other, to look each other in the eye. You know, on the Tube, if anyone says anything, everyone looks away," she said, explaining that she had only recently moved from the North.

With her delivered it was back down Hampstead Road and a young Lithuanian guy with not much more English than I had Lithuanian, was only too happy to jump on a stranger’s scooter on his way to Woolwich.

On a detour through Oxford Street he laughed and pointed at a pair of Hare Krishna, banging their drums and chanting. "Working, working," he called out, pointing.

Back in Waterloo, the anaconda of people at the bus stop wasn’t getting any smaller. Nicholas, from Leighton Buzzard happily jumped aboard the scooter once another passenger told us Euston mainline station had reopened. "God bless you," he said when I dropped him off. Embarrassingly he offered money.

I think I went back to Waterloo empty at that time, the crowds were getting smaller, but there was one guy, an umbrella-carrying classic Englishman in a striped business shirt who had seemed genuinely disappointed that Nicholas had jumped on first.

He was still there and happily folded his 6ft-plus frame behind me. We sped off over the bridge and up Kingsway, his umbrella dangling beside the scooter from his elbow. In Camden, the police took a dim view of my riding on the wrong side of the road but waved us through an intersection to my drop off point.

On an earlier one of the trips I stopped beside a young scooter on a souped up Gilera, the sort usually ridden with ear-splitting vigour. He had his spare helmet on his elbow.

"I hope you’re making good use of that," I asked him. "Yeah, I’ve made £120 so far – I’m charging them for a ride." He clearly thought I was an idiot and added: "It’s OK. I’m an entrepreneur."

Peter Bale is Online Editoral Director of The Times and The Sunday Times

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