A bumper crop of unusually dedicated athletes, an excellent coach, a stack of lottery cash, the main reasons for Great Britain's prowess at cycling are agreed. And then there's me. Yes indeed. Generally speaking, the more people engaged in a sport in a country, at any level, the better that country performs at the elite level. The breadth and solidity of the base of the pyramid determines the, er, pointiness, or height, or something, of its apex. This is why

Austrians and Swiss are handy on snow and ice, and Bajans and Fijians are not. God knows I've put the miles in, so I can (and do) claim credit for the achievement of Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton, Bradley Most Dickensian Name Imaginable Wiggins and the other viceroys of the velodrome. Their victory is my victory.

Yes, a gloriously unbroken chain stretches from Blighty to Beijing and, humbly, I take my place as but one small lubricating link in among it. I get on my creaking antique in East london and pedal five miles to Wapping at a speed befitting a not-very-fit 44-year-old. On the way, several men, women and, increasingly, children, overtake me. This causes them to go a little faster. I know this because on the rare occasions I trundle up behind a 65-year-old and wheeze past him, it lifts my spirits considerably.

The 35-year-old who takes me is, in his turn, taken by a younger, fitter model. And then somewhere farther down the road, too far in the distance for me to witness, the 28-year-old is blown away by a 21-year-old, who gives way to another 21-year-old who does a little amateur racing perhaps, and so on, round and round, up and up, to the men and women with the

4 per cent body fat, the zeppelin thighs and the coveted blingy saucers on ribbons. Therefore, and I genuinely can't see a flaw in this argument, it follows that I am an essential early pacemaker for the golden champions of the track. So where's my medal?

Will I ever learn?

A word of advice for anyone still daft enough to be contemplating a holiday in Britain: don't go to see Mamma Mia!. Not that Mamma Mia!is a bad film, on the contrary, it left young and old in my party smiling ear to ear. In fact, Mamma Mia!, if not gold medallist, certainly placed on the podium as one of the highlights of a rain-soaked “staycation” in West Wales.

The problem if you go to see Mamma Mia, in Pembrokeshire or anywhere else on the lavishly moist west coast of these islands, is that it features scene after scene of gorgeously sun-drenched, sea-sparkling, warm white-walled Mediterranean loveliness. And yet the chirrup of the cicadas fades all too swiftly as you emerge on to the rain-splattered streets of Haverfordwest or Newquay or Fort William, and you may at that point turn to your spouse, as I did to mine, and say: “Remind me, precisely why is it that we come here?”

The name of the game

Still, the weather forces you to come up with inventive ways of passing the time. Throwing plastic bags at fellow bodysurfers and shouting “jellyfish!” is one such. As is making fun of the bilingual road signs, as is playing Countdown with Welsh speakers, plenty of spare vowels to go round there. My favourite game this summer, however, was the delightfully named Shag or Shoot. A group of you gather in the bar, and then apply this unforgiving rubric to a string of celebrities or, more dangerously, someone else in the same hotel, or, more dangerously still, someone else at the same table. You then justify your decision to your wife, your friends, the person you've just had executed etc.

Interestingly, Shag or Shoot makes a mockery of the accepted categories of sexual preference. All men, for example, regardless of their usual proclivities and indeed club allegiances, admit they would sleep with Steven Gerrard given the option.

In a rich man's world

Another popular pastime, as the rain drives in horizontally across the beach, is guessing exactly how much the bloke who runs the local low-tide pony-trekking operation is making. Two excursions a day, 60-plus horses per trip, £30 a ride, I make that £3,600 a day, seven days a week, 25 grand a week! Costs? Negligible. We reckon feed and stabling can't amount to much, and the thing about horses is there's always a supply of 14-year-old (or, come to think of it, 64-year-old) girls who'll muck out for peanuts. Bit of insurance, bit of council tax, bit of kit replacement, a bit to the vet, can't be that much, and no disrespect to the sturdy creatures on show, but I don't think the stud fees made much of a dent in the balance sheet.

I'm thinking when the tolerably amusing lightweight column-writing business goes belly up, horse rental in West Wales might be the way forward.

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