I sometimes wonder if, like the hero of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, my molecules have become partly bicycle.

I've been riding bikes for as long as I can remember. Throughout my childhood, with the exception of five years in Australia, there were always bicycles around, and even in Adelaide I managed to borrow and fall off a few bicycles.

As a teenager I had to make do with a great heavy steel Raleigh that my uncle Rod gave me, that had a metal chain guard, Dyno Hubs, a huge chrome-plated front lamp and three-speed Sturmey Archer gears.

Stripped eventually of all excess metal, and with its handlebars turned upside down, this was transformed, at least in my imagination, into the fastest machine you could imagine.

It had a waterproof rubber saddlebag, and I would use this to transport gallons of stinking pond water and mud home from the marshes, to explore for water invertebrates at my leisure.

On that bicycle I would pedal through the countryside that surrounded Sittingbourne, eventually travelling along the Pilgrim's Way to the River Medway on the other side of the North Downs, to Faversham along the Lower Road that runs parallel to the A2, to the Upchurch marshes.

I would bring home fossil sea urchins and old clay pipe bowls.

At university I cycled regularly between South Kensington and the Imperial College Field Station at Sunninghill. I'd range far and wide at week-ends, even I remember, cycling through the night into Norfolk intending to surprise Ruth Lawson at home and then bottling out at the last minute and cycling back again. Ho hum... I wonder what happened to Ruth?

I of course went on riding...bicycles were less worrisome than women...and in 1970 bought a secondhand Dawes Red Feather in Rugby, which lasted me another 15 years or so. Then in 1985 Frances generously bought me my first ever brand new bike, another Dawes.

In Canada, having had to leave the Dawes behind in Newcastle, I resorted to building two road bikes for myself and Lenore out of the assembled bits of four others rescued from the scrap heap.

Lenore never used hers, but on mine I managed to have my only serious accident, being hit by not one but two pickup trucks on the road between Oliver and Osoyoos. Knocked into the highway by a truck reversing out of a smallholding, I survived thanks to the quick reactions of the second driver, which collided with my lycra-clad arse. I suffered only cuts and bruises and a lot of humiliation. I only show the scars to those who know me extremely intimately...

And now I ride a Ridgeback Epsilon, and it is on this beast that my cycle stories will be made... Lenore, who is a new and rather wary convert to cycling, has a Ridgeback K4.

CYCLE VOYAGES