One Saturday in July.

If anyone ever asked me what sort of route I’d be the least inclined to ride, my answer would inevitably be something in the Southeast of England. Miles after miles of narrow roads bordered by hedges, with tarmac of dubious quality and the omnipresent threat of SUVs driven by people who’d made way too much money in the City.

So it made total sense that, one Saturday in July, I set off before dawn to do precisely that.

Predictably, the start wasn’t very auspicious. I’d fallen foul of Transport for London’s penchant for taking any bit of uneven pavement and labelling it “cycle lane”. This specific specimen ran parallel to the A40 motorway and, in a nutshell, it was diabolical.

The sun was rising and I took a small break on a lay-by littered by cans of beer and Monster White. Somebody had painted the Wisła Krakow coat of arms on a nearby wall. As I drank the first gel of the morning, I asked myself the obvious question, why? To which there could be only one answer: because I can.

In a world dominated by obligations, do’s and must’s, this was my way to reassert agency. No one forced me to plot a 200-km ride from home to Oxford and back; I did. This is something that had no purpose, no meaning, led to nothing – I was literally returning to where I was started – and no one would take any notice. It made no sense; it made all sense.

The M25 orbital motorway encircles London like a concrete embrace, a moat of tarmac and traffic separating the capital from what lies beyond. On one side are the endless suburbs, chicken shops and hardware stores of Hillingdon; on the other, past a sign proclaiming that there weren’t going to be any road markings, were the Chiltern hills.

Here was the England of William Blake, that ‘green and pleasant land’ that rugby fans sing about at Twickenham for reasons that the citizenship test didn’t bother delving into. Too bad one couldn’t see it, for it lay hidden behind all sorts of shrubbery. Homes were ensconced behind tall, manicured laurel shrubs. Fields were invisible too, bordered as they were by impenetrable brambles, thickets of trees and all sorts of hedgerows conceivable. Every now and then a gap would appear, revealing a hill carpeted in golden wheat, or the driveway to a mansion replete with a green Range Rover parked on the manicured gravel; but these were brief interludes in what was an impenetrable green tunnel.

The sky, however, was as expressive as the ground was monotonous. Clouds ran across the blue canvas, spurred by a warm wind, and everything changed with reliable frequency. One moment it was as if cotton candy was being dispersed by an unseen hand across the firmament; the next moment dark cumuli rolled in, tall towers of vapour with gunmetal bellies and soft, ethereal tops. By the time I was approaching Oxford, however, the horizon had turned dark, crushed by long curtains of rain falling to the west and south of me.

I rode on, fully expecting to be drenched, but it never came. A brief drizzle had the benefit of washing the sweat off my back and, before long, Oxford came and went. Time for a coffee and a sandwich and I press on, past the kids on summer studies and the buses; the return leg beckoned.

This is the hardest part of the journey. More than 120 km done, still 100 to go. The hills, I’m realising, are more treacherous than I originally thought. Individually, they’re hardly more than a speed bump on the road, something worth upping one’s tempo to tackle in a single, hard, push. But they’re endless. One calls for another, then another, and before you realise it you’ve done 120 km of that and, man, you can feel it.

Alone on the road, I started hearing squeaks I’d been so far able to ignore, or little pangs of pain streaming up and down my hands, arms and legs. Somewhere, a voice from inside started saying that there were train stations pretty much everywhere, and it wouldn’t be too much of an effort to find one with a service to London.

I’ve always scoffed at those who proclaim not to be quitters, or that quote the sort of inspirational mantras stencilled on the walls of your local gym. Most of those who ‘don’t quit’ end up calling an ambulance, or so I always thought. But today, well, today it was different. Leaving this route incomplete would’ve meant having to come out again to re-do it, and the mere thought of that was way worse than the cramps I was experiencing, or the bag of pickles I was going to have to scoff down to get rid of them.

And so the kilometres rolled on in a blur of vertical hedges. At some point, all issues melted away and I entered the Zen zone of cycling. That state of blissful impermanence where all that matters is to turn the pedals. Climb a hill, descend. Turn the pedals. Eat a gel. Turn the pedals. Stop for an apricot and an ice cream, mount back up and pedal some more.

Meanwhile, leafy Oxfordshire was almost over. Henley beamed in the newfound sunshine and beautiful people sat outside having late lunches. I could hear the noise of corks popping above the whirr of my freehub. But I was in no mood to join them, because ahead of me was Berkshire. 

The name might be Tolkienesque, but my experience of it was more suburban hell than Shire. Big commuter towns, busy highways, roadworks, temporary traffic lights. This is the land where consultants and managing directors roam, tailgating lesser drivers with their Audis – and woe betide the poor cyclist. He his is own motor, for Chrissakes.

But, at that moment, my much-denigrated route yielded an unexpected surprise. The GPS track veered off the busy road I’d been riding on, hugging the double yellow line in the hope of avoiding close passes, and dove down the emptiest and most welcome gravel path I could ever imagine. Planes buzzed overhead, taking off from Heathrow, and the dull grumble of the M4 motorway filled the air, but over here I was alone on the path, honking geese and the Thames as my sole companions. Men dressed in elegant white ambled on the manicured lawns of the Slough cricket club, undoubtedly dedicated to the mysterious sport that required a board with seventeen different displays to count the score.

And then, having re-entered London through a concrete passageway dug under the eight lanes of the M25 orbital, I was on the home stretch. Two hundred kilometres, more than 1,600 metres of altitude gain and the satisfaction of having had such fun completing the most pointless, least interesting bike ride of my career as amateur cyclist.

In that precise moment I remembered that the lifts at home weren’t working, and that I lived on the sixth floor.