I went through a traffic light on my bike on the way to work, and as I got across the junction, something was niggling me, not an unpleasant niggle, just not quite normal. I'd got 50 yards up the street before I worked out what it was: the signal had been on green. Yes, it's that rare for a cyclist to execute a legal manoeuvre these days, you get a weird feeling when you do. It's the same when you occasionally find yourself cycling in the designated direction up a one-way street.

The strange thing was, I rather enjoyed the sensation of obeying, albeit unwittingly, the highway code. It struck me that the subcultural pressure to jump lights, mount pavements, swear at taxi-drivers and generally act the a-hole has been weighing heavy. This seemed silly, given that I started riding a bike in the first place because it's the least stressful mode of transport. I decided on a modest experiment, and over the past few days, not least because, as the years pass, I can do with the breather, I've been doing what signs and lights tell me to do, when they tell me, even late at night, even when there aren't police around. The contempt of fellow cyclists is hard to bear, but the new-found freedom is invigorating.

Meanwhile, a friend calls from New York to warn me that another friend has had his bicycle stolen. Not by the usual method of sawing off the lock, but by uprooting the street sign to which it had been attached. On discovering his loss, the victim smacked the metal pole in anger, only for it to topple over. The crime scene then revealed a lot of loose concrete at the base of the pole, which had then been replaced, the rubble tamped down, presumably for future use. For that minority of readers who use a pushbike in Manhattan, this was midtown, East 44th and First, bang opposite the UN.

The same old tune

Speaking of huge unwieldy corrupt bureaucracies run for the benefit of those who work in them rather than consumers, I'm struck by the parallels between contemporary hotels and nationalised industries in the Seventies. (Most hotels, I should say, not all, and I say Seventies, but nationalisation is making quite a comeback isn't it?) Peevish staff, petty rules, please-wait-to-seated, hideous decor, the insistence on the use of the word beverage, one day we'll wonder why we ever put up with the average hotel. We'll feel the same way about airlines and airports too.

And they're so fake, hotels. Where I stayed in wet and windy Sussex at the weekend there was a piano in the bar. As in, hey, we're not really a boring old business, we're groovy types here, let's party! My friend James is useful on the ivories, and he duly tickled out a tune, for about a minute and a half, which is how long it took for a member of staff to order him to stop. (It wasn't late, about 10pm.) The problem, explained the man, pathetically, was that some customers will use any disturbance as a pretext for getting their bill reduced. I can't say I blame them.

Cats and dogged

Evolution may have ground to a halt for human beings, yet it is still surging forward for cats. I used to buy the received wisdom that while dogs are pack animals, looking for you to boss them about, cats are independent loners, off doing their own thing. And then I started studying my own cats actual behaviour, and I became sceptical. They go everywhere together. If Tiger fancies the main room, Lucky follows. If Lucky gets interested in the hall, Tiger tags along. And they follow me faithfully around the place. Upstairs, downstairs, loo, kitchen, garage, stopping when I stop, starting again when I start, rolling over at my feet if they're feeling neglected.

As for going off on the sniff for days on end, half an hour in the garden is their limit. Either centuries of domestication are making cats more like dogs, or a mad geneticist somewhere is doing something extremely avant-garde with the pipette, the Petri dish and the DNA. I'm working on getting Tiger and Lucky to bring me the newspaper.

On the wrong foot

Back in Sussex, hobbling along the South Downs Way into a 60mph headwind, I concluded that when you gain weight, along with all the usual suspects, your feet get fatter too. How else to explain that a pair of well-worn boots that have never given any trouble produced two raging blisters within a few miles? The only difference between Saturday and the previous time of wearing is about two stone, a proportion of which, tiny no doubt but even a fractionally expanded fat cell can make all the difference abrasion-wise, is being stored on my heels. Feet behaving like buttocks? Cats behaving like dogs? Hotels behaving like the gas board? Cyclists behaving like law-abiding citizens? Truly, these are strange and unsettling times.

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