I’ve been meaning for ages to get my act together and write about cycle-related idioms and phrases that pop into my head while I’m riding.

It all started when I got stuck in a rut: literally, freewheeling down a long and fast farm track into Chadlington, the tyre depressions I had been following gradually deepened into foot-deep ruts. Even in shallower ruts, there’s no escape if you’re on two wheels as you just need to catch a tyre on the edge of the rut to effect a quick and painful somersault.

It suddenly dawned on me that in our busy lives we use charming phrases and idioms such as “stuck in a rut”. Their origins often stem from the lives that ordinary people led. The majority of the population lived in the countryside and most small roads were unpaved, so being stuck in a rut would have been a common daily occurrence.

The lo-fi nature of cycling is a wonderful reminder of the origins of many idioms and phrases in English. “Idiom” has several meanings. The one I’m using here is the Oxford English Dictionary’s: “[an idiom is] a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words.”

“Going downhill” in life isn’t a good thing, but on a bike and especially off-road “going downhill fast” is, for me, “the bees’ knees”. I’m generally “on cloud nine” flying down these Cotswold hills. I just like to “go with the flow”, “get into the groove” and “get off the beaten track”, though I do tend to seek shelter when it rains “cats and dogs”.

One can while away many an arduous climb – aka “uphill struggle”– by getting lost in the moment, wondering who’d have beaten those tracks. But what of the bees’ knees, and those cats and dogs? Both animal idioms have entertaining write-ups at www.phrases.org.uk/.

“The bees’ knees” was effectively a nonsense phrase for things that don’t exist. So for example an apprentice shopkeeper in the 1800s might have been sent to the back of the stores to find a jar of bees’ knees, and of course they’d be gone a good while. By the 1920s, “the bees’ knees” had come to mean “excellent”.

The origin of “raining cats and dogs” certainly has nothing to do with an email that did the rounds in 1999, according to www.phrases.org.uk/. Entitled “Life in the 1500s”, the email claimed, “You’ve heard of thatch roofs? Well, that’s all they were. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. They were the only place for the little animals to get warm.

So all the dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs, all lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery so sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Thus the saying, it’s raining cats and dogs.” In fact, the phrase probably has its origin in a Jonathan Swift poem of 1710.

Much of my cycling, and especially the rum incidents, can be told using idioms. The time my dog pulled me over when I was riding with her on the lead? She’d “got to the end of her tether”. The time I fell off when a wasp got stuck in a vent on the top of my helmet and I wobbled one-handed, then lost control, as the other hand tried to get it out? I had “a bee in my bonnet”. How much of your cycling life can you retell idiomatically?