Week 1: Pedals and passion

I am having a love affair.

Steely, silent, unforgiving and prone to whisking me off my feet at every opportunity, the object of my affections is everything I have always wanted.

It is also a bike. An Airlite 200, to be exact, with a beautiful lithe body and a tight black saddle to carve buttocks out of stone.

We don’t talk much, admittedly, but I think that’s part of the appeal. Who needs chat when you have wind in your hair, the sun in your eyes, a firm set of handlebars clutched in your grasp?

Instead of chat we have respect: me for my amore's impressively single-minded dedication to making my life a complete misery; my amore’s for my dogged determination to make the relationship work regardless.

My thighs may disagree, but I can't help finding something strangely, sado-masochistically admirable about The Bike’s 100 per cent disregard of any conventional notion of comfort - its wide-eyed puritanical zeal for getting from A to B as efficiently as possible, regardless of what limbs and buttocks might fly off in suicidal bids for freedom enroute.

Why, after all, have brakes you can reach without launching yourself prostrate across the frame like a dying hussar throwing itself on its sword, or toe-clips accessible without a guns-at-dawn showdown between foot and pedal, when it is much more challenging – and amusing to bystanders – to have otherwise?

Why have a seat that cups and cushions the buttocks, when you can have one that slices them up like a bullock in an abattoir and hangs them up on hooks to dry?

Some might call it evil - and to be fair they'd probably be right. But I think that's part of the appeal too. I remember in the film "Face Off" I always fancied the one who was looting and pillaging his way across the country, regardless of whether he happened to look like Nicholas Cage or John Travolta at the time. It's completely irrational, I know, but what can I do? Hence my last bike, with its big fat docile tyres and spacehopper saddle, is relegated to the back of the shed, while my new steed, with its icy glare and heart of granite, attains pride of place in its stead.

What The Bike must know, however, is that if it takes me down, it goes down with me. Which is really quite romantic, when you think about it – truly Thelma and Louise-esque (if you replace the silk headscarves with Met Crackerjack helmets and the Grand Canyon with the Watford Gap).

Take last week, for example. Having suffered a mini brain seizure in the early morning hours, I took it upon myself to cycle into work – all 28 miles of it.

At first all went well. Setting off around 6.30am, my extremities numbed quickly in the cool morning air and only the odd keen schoolboy and white van driver were witness to the strained, occasionally violent, power struggle between toe and toe-clip.

In fact, dare I say it, it was almost – and I stress the almost – enjoyable. Flicking between gear 14 (flat) to gear 1 (slight incline), I alternately glided and hamster-wheeled my way along the road, with the Hendon Times office in my sights like a Golden Fleece of Chrysomallos (but with irate drivers instead of harpies and animated skeleton armies).

I found, as I cycled along, that I was noticing many things I would never normally notice: birds' nests on walls, lavender scents from fields, a derelict pub with “Right Said Fred rock” daubed on its shutters... The day was stretching its arms and yawning, and I was there to greet it with breakfast in bed and a peck on the lips.

Then, almost imperceptibly, the world darkened. Potholes gathered in my path, cars and kerbs conspired to create Rebecca sandwiches at every junction, and hills lay in wait behind roadside shrubberies before launching themselves at me like bands of pistol-wielding highwaymen.

Then I accidentally swang onto a dual carriageway and avoided mounting the M25 by a margin narrower than the lead bullet masquerading as a saddle beneath my bottom.

Then somehow it wasn’t so fun anymore. Taking a much-needed map-stop on a grassy verge, having shot off a roundabout at a slightly more acute angle than the slip road warranted, it took all my will-power and more to remount and shuttle the final few blocks into town.

But, nearly three hours after I first set off, I - and The Bike - finally made it. Sweaty, yes; tired, yes; unable to sit down till long after lunch, yes.

But intact - and still very much in love.

Please visit www.justgiving.com/rebeccalowe81 to donate to the London to Paris cycle-ride.

All money goes to the Kisima Pastoralists' Centre, a children's charity for communities in northern Kenya: www.kisima.org

Thanks go to: Steve Howlett of Cyclelife Mill Hill, in Bittacy Hill, for very generously donating the Airlite 200. Phone the store at 020 8346 5784.