It would happen every Sunday afternoon, a pillar of my adolescent years. As I splayed across the sofa, immersing myself in a world of Sunday Grandstand or whichever James Bond movie ITV had settled on that particular week, my Dad would ask the question he already knew the answer to: "Right, how’s about a bike ride before it gets too dark? You might enjoy it." As the years passed I found it wasn’t even necessary to say "no"; a jerk of the head from the television screen with a scathing narrowing of the eyes as I met his expectant gaze, and the inevitable turn of my head back to the screen would tell him all he needed to know.

I am now shameful of this faultless display of lethargy, yet, at the time, I saw myself as a revolutionary against my Dad’s tyrannical regime against boredom. Even as I purchased my new bike at the beginning of second year (Uni-link isn’t free forever freshers) it was not, unfortunately, an enlightened surrender of this teenage stand for laziness, but a merely financial decision. Cycling was still an inconvenience, but by now an economic inconvenience.

My Dad was right all along though, as he always seems to be. After no more than a week pedalling from house to campus I’d decided to branch out, and I began to enjoy it. My housemate (another recently converted bicycle disciple) and I explored the multitudinous back roads and cycle paths that litter the city. We arrived places in half the time usually spent waiting for the buses (inevitably to be cancelled), refreshed and awake, something I rarely procured sitting amongst a group of silent strangers stuck in traffic on a U2B. Best of all we were doing all this without coughing out any noxious black fumes. Economically, getting to your destination for nothing has never been more rewarding, as the Uni-Link prices jump and petrol prices rise.

It is however, the enjoyment of the cycling itself, the freedom of selecting your own routes, the crisp smell of the common in the morning, the ethereal sight of a descending mist as you cycle home at night, that are the biggest rewards for riding a bicycle in Southampton. So why don’t you give it a go? After all, you might enjoy it.