Well, not really. I did have cause to put on my sunglasses for the first time this year as I cycled to work the other day, although that was more to avoid having my eyes put out by debris flung along by the raging wind.

I hauled the bike onto my shoulder to come up the steps from Waverley as usual and was immediately sucked out of the station entrance. I careened up the steps to Princes Street—in the film of my life, this would have been accompanied by the Benny Hill theme tune—and sheltered in the lee of the Balmoral Hotel to strap on my helmet, stick on my glasses and then head out into the traffic. It seemed to be pretty quiet for 9.30 am and I was at the top of Leith Walk within a few minutes, already moving at a fair old clip with wind roaring about me, occasionally gusting and threatening to knock me over but mostly just propelling me onwards at an ever greater speed.

“Wind is caused by a pressure differential,” the atrophied physics centre of my brain recalled. Bearing in mind its current ferocity and direction, anyone southwest of me must be having the life crushed out of them while the inhabitants of Fife would be dropping unconscious from lack of air. I thought all of this in a fairly distracted way, because I was by now charging down Leith Walk at a hundred miles an hour, gales at my back, hands hovering over the brake levers but my nerve holding and my squinting eyes streaming despite my glasses.

An old lady, failing to look a half-mile up the road as she crossed, stepped into my path. I veered to her right with all the alacrity of an U-turning oil tanker and shot past her before she even saw me coming. I couldn’t be sure, but either her hair had a blue rinse or I was travelling so fast I was experiencing relativistic effects.

Man, this was fun.

I reached work in a ridiculously short amount of time, nerves jangling and feeling like I’d just done the fun half of a Tour de France mountain stage.

So on the subject of cycling (such a smooth link) I submit to you that it is the solution to most of the UK‘s current woes, at least as I see them. It solves excessive traffic, obesity and organ donation in one fell swoop. Promote cycling and you get a population in rude health who take up less space on the road (and also in airline seats, which is especially gratifying) and who, should they be unfortunate enough to have an accident, will tend to leave behind a cracked skull and a full set of pristine, transplantable organs.

I can see no downside.

That night I laboured up Broughton Street, wind, gradient and rain against me, bike chain eating itself with grit off the road. God, it was awful.