I still don’t really know if I like cycling. I hope that in saying this that I have enough credit with the editorial team at Cycling Plus (BikeRadar's sister publication), my long-standing employers to whom I am very grateful, not to be instantly dismissed for going woefully off message with this latest column.
But, maybe it is an unacceptable breach of the code, and act of heresy, to admit to ambivalent feelings from time to time vis à vis pedalling a push-bike.
The thing is, I still greatly enjoy certain expressions of the bicycle.
I very much like to descend off a mountain at the Tour de France on my folding bike, watching on as Pete Kennaugh and David Millar race ahead, letting the elastic go (so to speak) and knowing that I have perhaps twenty minutes of gently drifting downhill, weaving through crowds, as the warm afternoon sun begins to sink towards the horizon of another race day in the Alps.
This kind of riding has a serene sense of purpose.
I also sometimes enjoy the quotidian activity of throwing a leg over the knackered old push-bike that lives in my shed and setting out onto some or other mission in London: heading to a voice-over studio, meeting friends, going to the café, theatre or bookshop.
This gives me such pleasure in fact that I have often been known to invent reasons to jump on the bike and tootle off up the road.
I volunteer indeed to run errands, the more menial the better.
This partly arises from the fact that I have no consistent gainful employment, and that if I am not on the road at a bike race, then I am probably loafing around at home staring at a computer screen trying to justify my existence.
But it’s also the case that I have completely lost any desire just to “set off” on a bicycle simply in order to ride.
In short, I need a point of focus, a target, a tangible objective.
I can no longer motivate myself (if indeed I ever did) to head out on a looping ride of several hours only to return to exactly where I set off, without any objective other than to rack up the miles and to gather data to share on social media.
All of this led me to conduct one of the longer rides of my life recently, when, for no good reason I decided to ride from my home in Lewisham to Minehead, where I was due to be co-presenting a darts tournament for ITV (live from Butlins!).
This trip, probably something close to 220 miles after getting lost in Basingstoke, seemed to represent a functional compromise between bumbling around, borderline athleticism (the climb to Quantock Common, for those of you who know it, is rather steep) and actually getting somewhere for a reason.
Conducted over three consecutive grey November days, with limited hours of daylight, it was a ride that oscillated wildly between idyllic and awful.
Let’s deal with one of the downsides: Surrey.
The county of 4x4s is rapidly losing any claim, post-London 2012, of being cycle friendly.
Passing through from Hampton Court to Camberley, I encountered the highest rate of abuse-from-passing-van per mile.
Then there was my pannier, which started day two by developing a curvature that meant that it periodically snagged on my spokes and slid back on the rack every time I went uphill.
And finally, there was my woeful lack of navigational preparedness.
Not often did I manage to sustain more than 10 or fifteen miles on B-roads before I was dumped back onto another thundering dual carriageway to take my chances. Oh, and the Somerset Levels were flooded.
But the ride had its transcendental moments, passing through Hampshire woodland, over rolling Wiltshire and into yellow-stone Somerset.
There were plenty of times when, lost in the simple wonder of putting such distances behind me simply by rolling up a trouser leg and pedalling, contentedness seeped into my wandering thoughts.
Indeed, by the time I crossed under the M5, passed through Bridgwater and up into the Quantocks, the sun had burst forth and the ride seemed like a golden reverie.
It was, of course, worth it. No ride is never not.
But it seemed an extended metaphor for my shifting ambivalence towards the act of cycling, and maybe I think I like it (mostly). Perhaps, after all I do.
