Richard Seager, 48, was working for Redland Roof Tiles in Stanton, between Diss and Bury St Edmunds, in October 1987.

He will never forget Friday, October 16 of that year as it took him and three colleagues more than nine hours and over 125 miles to get home to Diss - a journey which should have taken around 20 minutes.

Mr Seager, who now lives at Toft Monks, near Beccles, can still clearly remember the epic journey home that he, his two older brothers, Doug and Stephen, and their friend Ricky Barham, had to endure.

He said: 'We left Stanton and headed to Market Weston but our car (a Citroen) had a blow-out and three of us had to hold the car steady while my mate jacked up the car to change the tyre.

'We then went back to Hepworth because Market Weston was totally wrecked and back to Stanton and then tried going through Barningham, Hopton and Blo' Norton, but again we had to turn back.

'So we tried going to Garboldisham, Kenninghall, Banham and through Old Buckenham, but they were closed off, so we had to go back to Banham, and then in Kenninghall we ended up down a single track right until we ended up in Roydon and finally ended up in Diss.

'It was a nine-and-a-half-hour and 126-mile round trip and let's just say, I wouldn't want to do it again.

'At the beginning we thought it was quite funny, then we started seeing power cables arching together and we didn't think it was quite so funny.

'After that it was just chaos, there was debris everywhere. It started out as fun but then it kicked in when we saw cars with trees on them and we were thinking 'they could have had people in them'.

'When we got to Hopton, we realised we knew a guy near Garboldisham so we left the car by the side of the road and took the idiot's view of walking through the woods to his house because we knew a shortcut.

'We knew trees were crashing down around us but we made it to our mate's house and he boiled us up a cup of tea on the fire before we carried on.'