Real life | 26 April 2018

‘You’ve got your essay on your back, then?’ said the stable yard owner as I headed out with Darcy on our morning hack.

I have taken to wearing a hi-visibility vest even though I swore I would never join the Day-Glo brigade: large women on fat cobs plodding very slowly down the road in so much protective gear they look like they are going to fight the Taliban, not walk round the woods slower than a snail.

I swore I would never make myself look like them. I have ridden blithely along the country lanes of Surrey to reach the common for years and I have never had a problem with motorists, unless you count the loud-mouthed chav who wound her window down and yelled at me for not paying road tax.

Mainly, though, car drivers are courteous, or at least pass me with more than an inch to spare.

But then the whole cycling thing happened. Oh look, I don’t mean people on bikes. I mean cycling: the mania for pedalling as fast as possible, getting high as a crack whore on adrenaline and not slowing down or stopping for anyone.

Blame Bradley Wiggins, or Lance Armstrong, or middle managers wanting to dress up as Spiderman at the weekend… In any case, they come in their hordes and pedal until their veins pump them full of a toxic cocktail of endorphins. And in this compromised state, they would rather cycle straight through a horse than untie their feet from the pedals.

One day, I was tootling up the lane on my pony, cars slowing and passing with a wave, the next, or so it seemed, I was riding in the middle of an amateur Tour de France, running the gauntlet of thousands of Would-be Wiggins’s pedalling like billy-o.