When you cycle to work every day, rain, shine or howling gail accompanied by hailstorm and freezing temperatures, you come to appreciate how easy life can be. Filtering past queues of motorists you bypass the crawl of the modern city in the mornings and early evenings; picking routes out that would end in dead ends for others; leaving earlier in the morning, or taking your time coming home, because it's just such a nice day and every now and then it's nice to take it all in...

And after coming to appreciate it you start to take it for granted, which is why every cyclist should, just once in a while, take the car to work.

If ever there was anything to make you realise how good you have it.

I sat in all of the queues I would normally filter past, or bypass on a cyclepath, and not even the radio can rise me from the tedium of sitting staring at someone else's number plate, finding yourself reading the small print with the dealer's name and phone number, just to stave off the need to gnaw off your own right hand in boredom.

I get even more annoyed at errant motorists, because every person who squeezes into a too small gap, or who stops straight in front without indicating, is more of an obstruction to me when I'm also in a car. And the the coup de grace with a set of traffic lights stuck for our direction on red for 15 minutes.

On the bike I would have been off onto foot, pushing past on the pavement, then remounting round the corner. Instead I sit. And stew. And start swearing at the inane 'banter' on the morning radio shows.

Yes, that morning I truly learned to appreciate the bike.