I have a small electronic milometer on my bicycle which, among other fascinating statistics (maximum speed, average speed, current speed), records the distance covered to two decimal places. Thus ten and two thirds of a mile shows up as 10.66, just shy of 16 and a half miles is 16.49, and so on. It will be seen immediately that although those figures represent mileage, they can also be read as dates, very famous dates in the case of the two examples.

Using this insight, I have developed a game combining my twin interests of cycling and general knowledge. The game is to think, as you pedal along, of something significant that happened on that date in the moment that your milometer registers it. Beautiful in its simplicity, no?

You haven't got long. One one-hundredth of a mile is 17.6 yards, or not much over 50 feet. In the time it takes to cover that distance, 14.15 (battle of Agincourt), say, to 14.16 (nothing immediately springs to mind) you've got to come up with a birth, a death, a treaty, a publication, an invention, an edict, an horrific brutal blood-soaked racist massacre, something, anything, of at least a modicum of historical importance. And then on to the next one. And the next, and the next, all the while, of course, keeping a watchful eye out for Matthew “Piano Wire” Parris, whose house I pass, ducking low, on the way to work. Not easy.

Date-fancying cyclists will, as the miles and the memories unfold, appreciate the game's genius. Things presumably did happen in the thousand-plus years between the birth of Jesus at 0.00 and the battle of Hastings, but everyone was too busy avoiding a grisly premature death to hand down the relevant information. And yet the game turns the very darkness of the Dark Ages to the good, providing a tremendous incentive to race across the terra incognita to the much more eventful second millennium.

Once you arrive in four figures, and especially if you make the effort to gain the sunlit uplands of the action-packed, intensively taught, extensively chronicled 19th and 20th centuries, you're laughing. Assuming you have enough spare oxygen to laugh, that is.

Although you will be moving rather slowly by now, the better to score with each and every year.

Quibbles? I reset my computer to zero every morning, so, in the unlikely event that I exceed 20.08 miles in the day, history becomes futurology, which can be interesting, but could also be considered a limitation by long-distance specialists. Similarly, at the other end of the scale, no account is taken of the pre-Christian era. I tried to formulate a version where each 17.6 yards represents one year BC, but neither subtraction nor antiquity are a strong point.

Others will have to pick up that particular torch. David Cameron, for instance, could hire a classicist chauffeur to drive his smart shoes to work, shouting out the answers as they go.

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