My hero, the great and alarming Lord Tebbit, once gave out a famous message to the nation: on your bike. My advice, having finally followed his last Tuesday, is: get off your bike at once.

Cyclist, leave that bike alone. No good will come of bicycling. Ignore the pleas of the eco-warriors and the greens, rise above the bullying of the antimotorist brigade and the terrible costs of public transport and car parks; ignore the examples of politicians like Boris and Dave, who like to impress us with their bicycling zeal, or intellectuals who enjoy despising gas guzzlers and pedal righteously to fringe theatres in the suburbs. Say no to bicycling. It should be stopped.

I write as someone who had to bicycle to school every day for five years and who swore never to have anything to do with a bicycle ever again. There was, I thought as a schoolgirl, nothing nastier than pedalling hard uphill on a busy main road, terrified of being late, only to arrive hot and breathless at school, too puffed out to speak, still less sing at prayers. The overdevelopment of my calf muscles was a constant misery. Nor is it nice for a young girl, or a female of any age, to arrive at her destination in need of a shower but without any prospect of one. I sometimes wonder how Boris and Dave feel about this matter when they recommend bicycling to us all so passionately.

However, since many faintly green souls around me have taken up bicycling to work and for fun, and since London where I live is full of parks where bikes are allowed, and since the road everywhere is covered in mysterious painted hieroglyphs trying to entice cyclists up one-way streets, I was persuaded on Tuesday to go for a bike ride for fun. Our route was from Notting Hill, through the back streets to Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, St James’s Park and home by a similar route. For fun!

It certainly might have been fun. To have the freedom of all those beautiful gardens and lovely streets, with a light breeze in your face in golden light on a warm August evening, is by all but the most sophisticated standards a great pleasure. It is also good exercise, for those who feel they should worry about such things, and as a means of transport bicycling is quite astonishingly fast and quiet. I was riding a borrowed, state-of-the-art, fold-up Brompton machine, a triumph of British design and technology, and I was as impressed as a child by its beauty, its lightness and the astonishing feats of which modern bicycle gears are capable. What’s more, modern sports technology means that no girl these days needs to worry about overdeveloped calves. I also had every chance of a shower afterwards. Even so, it was all a nightmare.

City streets in heavy traffic are obviously dangerous for cyclists. What’s less obvious is that side streets can be even worse.

People step out rapidly from between parked cars, or suddenly open car doors, and while they might anticipate a car coming from its noise, they cannot hear a bike. My husband, although always fit and sporty, was recently knocked off his bike while he was going round a mini-roundabout by a woman in a Chelsea tractor who admitted she was entirely in the wrong; from her high seat she hadn’t even noticed him.

Car drivers overtake too close, sometimes, on narrow streets and it’s quite clear they often fail to see – or fail to look for – bicycles in their mirrors; I found they turned across me without using their indicators.

As for other cyclists not making signals, words fail me; even in busy traffic they do all kinds of unpredictable things – overtaking without warning and flitting about in all directions without making the slightest sign. When I protested at one of these dicers-with-my-death by primly ringing my bell, he got off his bike and was so frighteningly nasty I didn’t dare touch the bell again.

The painted cycle lanes in the side streets near us seem to have been dreamt up by a malicious child. It is daft to encourage cyclists to do what they often do without permission anyway - to speed up a narrow, curving, one-way street the wrong way in the face of oncoming motorists who, knowing they are in a one-way street, are not expecting anything coming towards them at speed.

Cyclists make this unnecessary danger even more fearsome with their nasty aggression: few people can have failed to notice that cyclists often seem to feel themselves in the midst of some sort of ill-defined class war. Instead of cycling carefully down such ambiguous streets, they straddle them aggressively, lurching from one side to the other, as if to maximise the motorist’s risk of killing them.

It ought to have been a relief to escape from all this into the park, but things there were worse. I’ve known for years everyone in parks hates cyclists, for the obvious reason that they are a menace, but I didn’t realise that cyclists hate each other. Now I know. Cyclists in parks don’t always confine themselves to bike lanes, but when they do they are terrifying: they whizz straight at you, sometimes in pairs, or hurtle past you without warning, and sometimes force you to swerve away from them into the grass or a couple of innocent pedestrians. Heads down, thighs shinily encased in suggestive synthetics, they ignore the beauty of the evening and the presence of anyone else in their horribly competitive spurts of energy and their obsession with speed.

I had no idea bike lanes in parks could be dangerously crowded, with bikers surging irresponsibly in both directions. The object seems to be to outdo everyone else – to monopolise the lane, to get there first, to cut in at crossings, swerving through the pedestrians and barging past other bikers. Crossing into the centre of Hyde Park Corner and over to the Mall on the paths which bikes are entitled to use was genuinely alarming - just about as alarming as jumping the lights as some cyclists do. I arrived home in a state of nervous exhaustion.

This isn’t fun. Nor is it a good way of getting about. Apart from the dangers, and the fog of particulates that the cyclists breathe in, there is the problem of hygiene: there cannot be many offices where commuting cyclists can shower and store clean clothes. I will not even mention the problems of how to look clean and well ironed straight off a bike, or how to get to a dinner date in a floaty dress which hasn’t got snagged in an oily chain. Bicycling seems to be suitable only for the reckless, nerveless unwashed and it’s a public menace as well. Get off your bike before you’re knocked off.

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