When asked why, for all his green pronouncements, he never cycles in London, Ken Livingstone explained that when he was a child “we were too poor to afford bicycles”. These days our Mayor’s £137,579 salary would buy him the grooviest graphite two-wheeler on which to tour his 32 boroughs.

But I always suspect that Ken sees getting around London in the terms of an old revolutionary propaganda cartoon. Motorists are top-hatted toffs, toot-tooting about, smoking cigars, while users of public transport – as Ken considers himself, though he mostly means taxis – are the stoic strap-hanging masses, shoulder to shoulder in noble struggle against train companies and Tube bombers.

Cyclists, meanwhile, are anarchists, irritating, irrelevant, ill-disciplined individualists. And while political fashion dictates that Ken must celebrate the proliferation of cyclists, you just know he’d love to put them down brutally, as Lenin and Trotsky did the Kronstadt sailors.

No doubt Ken will have his prejudices confirmed by the Department for Transport report that reveals the richest fifth of the population, predominantly white, middle-class males, are the most likely to cycle. But it is not the expence of cycling that makes it the preserve of the privileged, but the arrogant sense of entitlement necessary to ride the urban mean streets. And this quality seems to correlate with wealth, aside from those hardo hoodie boys riding too-small BMXs.

I’ve just got back on my bike after a four-year hiatus. On day three of a Tube strike that was keeping me from the new autumn fashions in Selfridges, I walked into Edwardes of Camberwell and left riding a silver Dahon collapsible bike. On its maiden journey, I remembered why I’d given up: cycling in London is an extreme sport, little safer than base jumping. Every time a bus skims past or I wobble on a drain cover or I have to trust that a FedEx driver has seen me, I imagine my skull being squished like a watermelon. A journey begins with trepidation and ends with me slightly high that I’m still alive.

The city hates the cyclist. It is evident from every spiteful sign saying “Bikes attached to these railings will be removed” (how are they possibly hurting anyone?), the warnings around Covent Garden that police will punish those who don’t dismount (why not draw bike lanes through pedestrian precincts?), the scarcity of cycle racks, the mapped routes that suggest we take looping detours while cars hog the crow-flight main roads . . . See, after just three weeks in the saddle I’m already brimming with cycling self-righteousness.

And so the cyclist has no choice but to take the role of maverick gunslinger. Which explains the ludicrous Lycra worn by the harder-bunned biker: battle dress, superhero garb. You are a law only to yourself and when you see just how many senseless new traffic lights Ken has installed, you jump them, because it is only you who will die.

On a bike, she who hesitates is dead: it is women who cycle timorously, clinging to the kerb, who are most often killed by left-turning lorries. I stick to the centre, regardless of beeping behind, away from parked drivers who’d kill me with a flung-open door. And I ride pavements too but only – before you press “send” on that e-mail – on those vast empty sidewalks approaching bridges that could spare a few feet for a bike lane.

On two wheels you are self-reliant – you have the pleasure of knowing exactly what time you will arrive, independent of timetables or traffic – and utterly alone. No wonder you despise not just the cars who would kill you, but pedestrians and passengers for their pathetic passivity, waiting at bus stops, the lazy losers, drifting like dozy sheep across your hero’s trail.

This week times2 reported that the old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg bike is regaining popularity. But they’re a fashion fad, not a London solution. Even the main importer of these Danish classics doesn’t actually ride one. My last bike was a baby-blue upright Claud Butler with a basket at the front. I’d just been sacked from a high-powered job and fancied I’d rebrand myself as a carefree mummy with flour in my hair. But I couldn’t get Claud up the damn hill.

Besides, it was the kind of bike you ride in Amsterdam or Copenhagen, where cycling is universal and déclassé, where the mayor does not want you to die so has created a lovely path separated by a concrete barrier rather than expecting you to dice with bendy buses. The upright bike is democratic, it should cost €10 bought fifth-hand from some bloke who dragged it from a canal, not £400 from a poncey retro boutique. It should be ridden with chic insouciance, in ordinary clothes, with a serene half-smile. The London cyclist’s default expression is grim.

No, the solution to London cycling is the folding bicycle. It’s like a jet pack! I collapse my bike, take the train into town, then pop it back together, breaking only two nails on average, and zip off. If I get lazy or late or drunk, I can sling it in a cab. I check it into the cloakrooms of posh hotels or bars, so no one can nick it. I have never in my life owned anything so remotely cool.

This week, after a lunch for Anna Wintour, the legendary editor of American Vogue, I watched as the soignée editors of British magazines hung about phoning impatiently for cabs. OK, I had helmet hair, was unable to wear heels, probably smelt a bit whiffy up close but at least I was free. Still, after I cycled off down Bishopsgate, I made sure to wait a good six blocks before I removed my decent jacket, stuffed it in my bag and pulled on a filthy cycling fleece.

At this lunch, it struck me how far British women’s magazine editors are – with perhaps one exception – from the fictional image of humourless fashionistas depicted in Ugly Betty or The Devil Wears Prada. All of them mix an excitement about fashion with the mischievous sense that it’s all slightly silly. At the shows, the British editors pass sweets and notes, the glacial Americans cut rivals dead.

And unlike La Wintour, who is a proper size zero – fabulous from a distance, but rather alarming close up – none of them is wasting away. In fact, as the regal editrice left us to our petits-fours, the question around the room was not “who” was she wearing, but “Did you see? Anna ate a whole potato!”

Times Recommends

• Too proud to claim my Jaffa Cakes on expenses
• The devil is in the detail for the dark lord
• I was wrong to sneer. The lottery is a winner