I don’t know how to break this to you. Perhaps it’s best just to say it out loud. Okay, here goes: I think I might be a cyclist. I’ve been experimenting with bicycles. I take them out and I ride them. I ride them — they don’t ride me, okay? I’m not a scene biker. I don’t get dressed up in figure-hugging Lycra. I don’t do shorts and I don’t have a purple helmet. But I don’t mind a bit of high-vis Day-Glo. Just a dash, an accent. I suppose, actually, I’m cyclo-curious bi. I’ve still got the car, and I love her very much. It’s just that I’m not in love with her any more.

I don’t believe I was born a cyclist, but I’ve grown to love the feeling: turning up tight lanes where you couldn’t go with a straight eight. I’m a bit of a metro-cyclist. I don’t want to go dirt biking — nothing rough and soggy. I’ve no inclination to hang around bridle paths, panting. I’ve just found a niche in the fellowship of urban cyclists. We don’t talk much; we just meet up for intense moments under red lights and eye up one another’s cogs.

Cycling crept up on me — or wheeled up. I bought a bike for my boy, and when he went to school, I used it to go down to the perfumers and local soft-furnishing festivals. One thing led to another, and now I ride an imported New York hybrid road bike that has only one gear and a rack like a Village Person’s tache.

Early on Easter Sunday, I rode down the Thames towpath from Putney Bridge to Syon House. It’s roughly the route of the boat race (very roughly — they do the boat race in the water), which had taken place the day before. Now the river was full of skullers skimming the pewter Thames on the big bow to Mortlake. There are few motions as satisfying to watch as rowing, with its smooth synchronicity, the sense of great effort and strength combined with feathery weightlessness. And then, in the distance, there was someone sinking. The only thing better than watching skulling is watching sinking.

The path was peopled with fat joggers, chaps dragging reluctant labradors and middle-aged men with shaven heads, threatened by younger trainees at the office, bouncing and gasping on mountain bikes. Church bells were announcing a resurrection for the 2,000th time, and I thought: how glorious. How perfectly, tintinnabulatingly, ripplingly glorious. This is why I live in an inner city. You’d never get anything like this in the country. It’s only in a city that God really understands how to organise nature.

If this were the country, I’d never be able to get near the river. There would be a Passchendaele of barbed wire, seeping drums, decomposing agricultural machinery and miles and miles of agri-business megafields with an odd bit of brutalised hedgerow. The only thing skulling the river would be a skeletal sheep’s corpse. The countryside is nature’s scrap yard. You need a park to see the true symbolic beauty of Gaia’s bounty, and London has the greatest parks of any city — certainly far better than any bit of unmade, raw, grubby, poisonous, dung-and-pesticide countryside.

Every couple of years or so, I’m moved to write a why-oh-why column asking why London doesn’t make more of its parks; why their catering has been so uniformly abysmal. There are the ice-cream vans tinkling Smack My Bitch Up from loudspeakers as they push extruded pig fat and corn syrup around playgrounds like cholesterolic gastrophiles, and the stalls selling tepid brown water and Wagon Wheels with sell-by dates written in Roman numerals.

Inn the Park (I’m ignoring the name — if I start, I’ll never finish) is the cafe in St James’s Park. Though I’ve never been before, it has been here for a few years and is, I’m told, the third way for Arcadian grub. It is housed in a big wooden shed, which is probably a low-impact amenity pod created from renewable sources.

St James’s is the invisible park. Nobody has sung a song or written a play about it. It’s the park no Londoner ever goes to. And it’s rather quaint. There’s a lake where amusing pelicans eat pigeons. People come from all over the world to watch. I passed a group of Russian tourists being taken round by a guide who had made herself into a human iPod by strapping a small loudspeaker to her chest. She was broadcasting a monologue, pointing out where the first strike of glorious, glorious intercontinental ballistic missile would have landed in the good old days.

The restaurant was busy. You have to book to sit outside on the terrace, but I think you’re better off inside. You don’t get gawped at and asked the way to Wigan Pier, or accused of not being a pearly king or a beefeater by irate gangs of Ukrainians wearing T-shirts saying: “My dad went to London, but all he got me was a child prostitute wearing this T-shirt.”

The menu is modish Englishish. I started with a spring salad that promised goat’s cheese, artichoke, broccoli, hazelnuts and golden beetroot. What came was an entire hedgerow of various leaves, all slicked, a hazelnut and a minute, infinitesimal gobbet of pale earwax, which turned out to be the goat’s cheese.

For main course, I shared Reggie Johnson’s corn-fed duck. An annoying number of ingredients come with random names, like the people who phone Radio 1 and ask to thank all their friends. I don’t know what Reggie’s relationship to my duck had been before it died — or even after — and I’m not sure I want to. But having to speculate about Reggie and my duck didn’t improve the flavour. It was duck. It was dead. It was greasy and tepid and rubbery. (Ducks always have to be rubbery — it’s a critic’s rule.)

The grilled Herdwick mutton cutlets were also tough, curly things, like a large Fijian rugby player’s ears. It’s good to see mutton on a menu, but chops are best left to the lambs — mutton needs to be slow-cooked as Lancashire hotpot or Irish stew. Desserts were bakewell tart and a golden-syrup pudding. Neither was any better than supermarket-bought, but still, that’s not bad.

The service gently unravelled — and then less gently. It was like watching someone’s knitted skirt catch on a nail and leave them standing in bra and panties. They ran out of cutlery, then patience, then any clue and the will to live, but remained surprisingly charming and, if not helpful, then helplessly optimistic. I particularly liked the girl whom I finally begged to give me a bill. She had plainly decided to rise above all of this.

“Does the service charge go directly to the staff?” I asked. “I wouldn’t know,” she replied with an airy hauteur. “Really? But you work here.” “Not here,” she said, with an elegant wave. “I’m on reception. I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Lunch costs £22.50 for two courses or £27 for three, which is jolly decent value for perfectly well-intentioned food in a nice hut in a lovely park. They like dogs and they don’t mind children. And I could vada the wheels on the Ridgeback chained to the meat rack outside.

Inn the Park

St James’s Park, SW1; 020 7451 9999, Mon-Sat, 8am-10pm; Sun 8am-5pm

Ratings: 5/5 Park Avenue; 4/5 National Park; 3/5 Walk in the Park; 2/5 Park and ride; 1/5 Trailer Park

Times Recommends

• Top Ten most searched for recipes
• Chalet Chef 2010: the winning menus
• Gin and pomegranate jellies