At the recent memorial service for my old English teacher, Jim Cogan, a great scholar and adventurer, a fearless sailor, a defiant burrower into the dark heart of Africa, and a man who never, ever wore a cycling helmet, his friend James Flecker recalled Jim’s nighttime cycle journeys through London without lights, without helmet, suit trousers tucked into socks, a wobbling road phantom unmoved by intimations of mortality.

And he told how one morning, arriving at an office they shared together, he, Flecker, took off his cycling helmet and laid it on his desk. Then put down his flashing red and white lights. Then took off his high-visibility vest and was just removing the second of his luminous trouser clips when Jim, who had been watching this awesome display of road sense, sighed and said: “For the Lord’s sake, James, at least die like a man.”

I thought of Jim this week when I saw Boris Johnson apologising for cycling without a helmet, and promising to wear one in future. And I thought: “You big sissy. You frilly bloody great girl. You’ve gone and blown it.”

And he has, you know. He has let his guard down in the sweet minutes after victory and shown that he is as much a slave to the vain, modern quest for immortality as any vegan actress or eco-crazed old pop star. And is thus, now, utterly pointless.

I had thought Boris was one of us. I thought he grasped that eternal truth that to be unafraid of life, you must first be unafraid of death.

One of the great reasons for respecting Boris, despite everything, was his devil-may-care attitude to cycling. And, indeed, to everything. There are a lot of crap and embarrassing things about being an old-fashioned English toff, but fearing desperately for one’s life has never been one of them.

Boris looks silly, sounds silly, says silly things, and went to a silly school, but what he offered, we thought, was a sort of old-fashioned bluffness in the face of peril, the stoicism and wit of an Empire builder who would demonstrate, in these postImperial days, that there are other things that such a man can build. I used to look at Boris and think of Henry Newbolt: The river of death has brimmed its banks, And England’s far, and Honour a name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks – “Play up! Play up! And play the game!” But you can’t play the game in a polyurethane bonce-protector, Boris. That’s not how it works. (Indeed the very sport from which Newbolt draws his analogy, cricket, ceased to be a game for gentlemen at the very moment that batsmen began wearing helmets – why should I pause in my busy life to watch the antics of men so femininely fearful of personal injury?) The cycle helmet is one of the great emblems of the failure of 21st-century manhood, like the seatbelt, and the gymnasium, and the low-fat diet, and the airbag, and the sunblock, and the one-aspirin-a-day.

It’s just so vulgar to treasure one’s mortal coil this brazenly. To wear so publicly one’s trembling, pasty-faced fear of death.

You mustn’t care if you die, Boris. Fear of death is for Them, not Us. To worry overmuch about the extinction of any human is a postEnlightenment vanity. There is no shortage of people. Least of all of people like you and me – silly men, born to privilege, succeeding beyond all expectation on the back of a self-confidence to which we are scarcely entitled and opportunities we have not earned – no shortage of daft buggers to step in and take your place if you crack your head on a lamppost.

Road safety is a mirage, anyway. I have never worn a cycling helmet and I never will. For it creates a false sense of security, not to mention making you look too unsexy to whistle at girls. For the same reasons, I have never worn a seatbelt in a car (and have the copious licence endorsements to prove it). It’s scratchy and annoying and pulls at your clothes. It creates a sense of cockpit security that encourages me to drive faster. And also it creases my shirt, which is a waste of ironing. I am very much with the chap from Rospa who said that the surest way to ensure road safety would be to mount a 6in spike in the middle of every steering wheel.

Get your helmet off, Boris. They voted for you because you don’t wear it. That’s your whole thing. Don’t listen to the wet-eyed mummies at the school gates or the Trots in the mayoral press office. Get it off. Play the game. And if there’s a bump out there with your name on it, then, for the Lord’s sake, Boris, at least die like a man.

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