I’ve been feeling particularly nostalgic this year as I ride some of my usual routes around town.

Queen’s Lane is particularly evocative on these cold evenings – mist swirls around the olde lampposts and the clipetty-clop of well-heeled undergrads echoes against the centuries-old walls.

A few blissful rides have led along Barracks Lane, over the ring road, and up into Shotover, which is unseasonally dry for February.

You have the bridleways all to yourself on weekday mornings.

In the bright winter’s sunshine nothing beats the short, sharp lung-burning climbs and the fast descents. What a hidden gem and so accessible, right on the edge of the city.

You can cycle with a dog on and off the lead to most places in Oxford, avoiding roads 90 per cent of the time.

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An all-time favourite is the Thames dog-loop, a great circular route that starts on the towpath at Donnington Bridge, heading up to Abingdon Road.

The sights and sounds of the river – the cygnets and swans, the boat crews, Christ Church through the trees on the meadow – are powerful Oxford memories.

The route passes through Grandpont and on to Osney Island. Over Botley Road and the towpath takes you all the way up to Wolvercote. Doubling back there’s half a mile of back streets from Jericho to the University Parks, with the dog trotting on her lead.

Shame on the University Parks for displaying those spiteful signs: “No cycles, whether ridden or not”.

Bypassing the 'no bikes allowed' Parks you’re off-road again past Mesopotamia, and on to that most glorious of cycle tracks over the flood-meadow at Marston.

A steep climb through Headington Hill Park and South Park leads to East Oxford.

Being circular you can obviously start that ride from anywhere in the city – Grandpont, Botley, Jericho, North Oxford, Marston, or Headington.

Head-down, getting about your business, struggling along Cowley Road or dicing with death at the Plain, it’s easy to feel the city’s vile on a bike.

But these rides really have reminded me what a wonderful cycling city Oxford can be.

When I moved to Oxford 20 years ago I was 27. Living in Grandpont and working at Jordan Hill I had a gentle four-mile commute.

I didn’t waste time weighing up my options.

The bus wasn’t viable: I’d have walked a third of the journey before boarding a bus in Magdalen Street, not to mention the cost of tickets.

Driving there, even 20 years ago, would have been torture – and expensive. No, Oxford in the ’90s was clearly a cycling city, even to someone who hadn’t ridden in a good 10 years and for whom driving was the default.

Oxford was a place where for all sorts of reasons people still rode in their tens of thousands, where one sensed safety in the numbers, and where on a cross-town commute the only mode that made sense was the bike.

I marched straight to the bike shop in the Covered Market and acquired a decent £200 Raleigh hybrid. It was a no-brainer.

My housemate and I would race every morning up to Jordan Hill. Winning mattered, for it meant getting first to the shower at work.

Keenness on cycling quickly gave way to fervour, and within a year I was a militant campaigner, damning drivers in their selfish, polluting little boxes as only 20-somethings can.

I calmed down, growing older and wiser, and by the time I founded Cyclox in 2004 I was positively sage.

Whence all this nostalgia? By the time you read this column my family and I will have moved fromleft Oxford, our bicycle-saturated haven of two decades.

We’re moving to for Charlbury, a wonderful Cotswold town not renowned for its cycling – yet.