I cycled 2,628 miles last year. That's an average of 50.53 miles a week. I got in the saddle on 324 days out of 365. That's 88.76 per cent, almost nine days, less an hour or two, in every ten. On 152 out of those 324 days, I cycled ten miles or more. That's 46.91 per cent.

And yet, fascinatingly, of those 152 days at ten or more miles, on only one day, I believe it was June 24, did I exceed 25 miles. And 25 miles is a mere warm-up for a serious road racer or tourer.

So I am the very definition of a frequent, and yet short-distance, cyclist. I use a bike to commute, and that's it. By the way, if you think it eccentric to keep a record of such statistics, you're wrong. It's way, way beyond eccentric, it's well into downright weird. But hey ho, it takes all sorts to make a world.

Anyway, I ought to be pleased with the report that says Britain has gone bike-crazy. Half a million more bikes sold in 2007 than in 2005. Number of cycle journeys in London doubled since 2000. Bicycle use in Sheffield, of all places (note to southerners: Sheffield is built on seven hills, like Rome) up 50 per cent since 2001. And so forth. But I am not pleased. Not pleased at all.

All these new enthusiasts for pedal power are to me what I am to a proper Hull City supporter, the sort of fan who went to see them even when they were utter rubbish, propping up the entire league. They're glory hunters, these converts. Carpetbaggers, bandwagon jumpers, Johnny Come Latelys, and in the curious logic of the zealot, a late convert is worse than no convert. A colleague of mine says he still resents fellow Tories who only became Eurosceptic after Margaret Thatcher made her Bruges speech, whereas he was one before. I feel his pain.

It's not often in life that you can claim to be an early adopter, in at the start of something that subsequently becomes received wisdom. It's happened to me on four occasions, three of them musical. I liked Tom Jones before he covered Kiss and was rediscovered as a retro icon. I liked bluegrass before the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack made it cool.

And I remember the first thrilling time I heard Wham! Rap, summer of 1982. I thought: that's serious talent, that is. The song got to a risible 45 in the chart and I was ecstatic. Twelve months later Wham! were the biggest band in the country. Mortifying.

And now it's happened with cycling. And as with George and Andrew, I liked it the way it used to be, one of a small band of true believers, mocked and persecuted, run off the road by sneering men in vans, and yet keeping the faith, masked and goggled, off the grid, an urban outlaw. An urban outlaw who didn't get overtaken by smug 25-year-olds on brand-new bikes every 100 yards.

Wingside seat

Sticking with modes of transportation, it struck me with blinding clarity while landing at Nice-Côte d'Azur airport last Saturday that the flaps on an aircraft's wings are extraordinarily basic bits of kit. To think of the technology packed in a modern jet, the engineering, the navigation, the communications gear, the hundreds of little lights and dials and switches and knobs and levers in the cockpit, and yet to stop the thing you basically flip up a few metal panels really quickly and hope for the best.

It's as if Lewis Hamilton slowed down for the corners by holding up a big towel.

Coat d'Azur

I flew to Nice bound for Monaco, home of the marginally-less-boring-than-all-the-other-grands-prix grand prix. What a wonderful place Monaco is, allowing as it does the columnist the chance to employ the words Ruritanian, tinpot and minuscule Mediterranean tax haven in one sentence. People in Monaco, I noticed, have absurdly fastidious dress sense. At the airport on the way home, I fumed in the queue for security while my fellow passengers first folded and refolded their coats, and then their jackets, and then their scarves, and their gloves, and then, God help us, coiled their belts up just so before reverently placing the ensemble in the grotty plastic X-ray tray as if it were a window display in one of their ghastly shops. Allow plenty of time is my advice.

Reading arithmetic

Talking of the working, as opposed to the idle, rich, I wonder who the “senior Labour figure” was who said on Monday that “£150,000 may seem a lot in Edinburgh, but it isn't a lot in Reading”? Er: yes, it is actually. Leaving aside the fact there are more, lots more, people on 150 grand in the Scottish capital than the Berkshire town, does anyone imagine 150K isn't much of a salary? I wouldn't mind the chance to begrudge paying the higher rate that £150,000 a year will soon incur. In Edinburgh, in Reading, even in Monaco, it's a bicycle load, a car load, a planeload of money. At least I hope it is.

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