This was an emergency cycle. I had got my ASLEF and RMT strikes mixed up, and thought Friday was the “reduced service” rather than “no trains whatsoever” day [1].

I set off slightly after 4pm, down the hill and around the ruins of the Royal Albion hotel and then out along the seafront through Hove and Portslade.

The wind was strong, and directly against me, so that first ten miles was a bit of a slog, but I was still faster than the line of cars queueing up through Shoreham.

On the approach to Worthing, a guy on a motorbike shouted furiously at me. As he passed I gave a confused shrugging gesture, even though I’d guessed the cause of his anger. Sure enough, he started pointing at the pavement, bellowing “use the cycle lane”, his eyes popping with the injustice of it all.

I looked. There was a narrow shared use path, covered in bits of broken glass. These are not mandatory for cyclists. And frankly, why do motor vehicles insist on using A-roads when we’ve built them perfectly decent motorways?

Bloody cyclists, always on the pavement. Bloody cyclists, always not on the pavement.

I like Worthing. As well as a very serviceable Wimpy, it has a delightful old cinema on the seafront, a decent pier, and a rather splendid chunk of Brutalism, its veranda (can a car park have a veranda?) housing a trendy food and drink market for the Brighton exiles. It is “one of the finest modular pre-cast car parks in the land”, or so I am reliably informed; it is also doomed, to be demolished for housing at some uncertain future date.

After cycling along the wide seafront against the wind for another mile, I turned mercifully inland, through Goring by sea [2], and was finally able to average slightly more than 12 miles an hour.

From here to Littlehampton was a little tedious, as I was forced to cycle alongside a dreary A-Road as we were all being bottlenecked towards the Clympwick Bridge, the only way across the river Arun.

Once over, I was able to skip up onto some minor roads to Chichester, the route through Oving the first proper bit of rural England I’d experienced all afternoon.

Chichester was beautiful and weirdly empty at dusk on a warm Friday evening. I cycled past the cathedral and along the Roman road to get back on the Main Road at Fishbourne, turning my lights on and enjoying the relative lack of wind. Who knows, I may have even cycled faster than 15 miles an hour somewhere along this stretch.

Havant was a pretty town surrounded by massive roads, and I got a little lost on my way out, trying to find where bikes could get beyond the flyovers onto the bike path along to water to Portsmouth. I found it eventually, having to cross some hairy slip roads in the process, all the while guided by those blue shared use signs that reminded you that, yes, this is what passes for cycling infrastructure in England in 2023.

From here, it was simple enough, along a well-maintained path mercifully separate from the motorway, and I cycled past bats and estuary mud all the way to Southsea and my parents waiting in the tap room bar.

[1] It’s perfectly cromulent to use a train on a strike day, you’re only crossing a picket if you’re planning to drive a train, something I’m a bit rusty at.

[2] No, this was not named after Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring. Frankly it’s amazing that you’d think that. What a fatuous question to ask.