Ten minutes after the medic removed the wide-gauge needle from my arm, I was stamping on the pedals, surging away from the clinic through rush hour traffic – head held high. The fresh, bloody, track mark on the inside of my elbow was concealed by a strip of medical tape and a plaster. But I was making no attempt to hide the fact that my inner arm had recently received a jab. This is not a stark, Armstrong-esque, confession. I’m no amateur blood doper. I’m certainly not a pro cyclist! In truth, I’d just spent an hour and a half at the NHS Donor Centre , at St George’s Hospital, in Tooting, south London, while a very large needle, drew out and returned, small quantities of blood. No hiding on the floor of a team coach for me. In plain sight, I’d been hooked up to an apheresis machine which separated platelets from the rest of my blood – aptly enough, by spinning it - before pumping what remained back into my body. This process is repeated, over an hour or more (typicall...

Nothing beats cycling round south west London’s Richmond Park. I commute through it twice a day at all hours. We take our nephew and niece there for two-wheeled adventures. And we spin round its perimeter with hundreds of other Lycra wannabes whenever we can spare the time. Anyone with two wheels in west London knows about the park. It's a splash of cool green in the middle of suburban concrete. And nothing compensates more, for dragging your carcass out of bed at four am for work, than the sight of the park, deserted in the pre-dawn, shrouded in a low-lying mist, through which the antlers of recumbent deer can be seen, poking upwards like fronds of petrified coral, sprouting still from their prehistoric seabed. There are numerous theories to explain the presence of these non-native parakeets in London If it’s been raining at this early hour, flocks of startled  parakeets  who’d been drinking at roadside puddles,    eru...