Sidestepping a banal conversation about holidays, I pat myself on the back before my barber can repeat his swashbuckling tales of Red Sea adventures. Wise to his routine, I deftly steer the conversation – via an obligatory nod to the recent warm weather – towards a new topic.

Scissors poised, he looks down pensively, almost sympathetically, as I describe how the warm weather makes cycling around my new West Oxfordshire patch such a joy. What follows is as unexpected and as it is bizarre.

I have to hand it to the guy, for he is a consummate professional. In the blink of an eye and the flash of a razor, he manages to morph the promising topic of “cycling” into his preferred angle: “cyclists” – specifically, in fact, “bloody cyclists”.

The ensuing 20 minutes of cycle-slating would not be out of place in the Daily Mail or a phone-in session to the local radio station. But given that we’ve established that I’m keen pedallist, why go out of one’s way to alienate a customer so thoroughly?

Rather than riffing alone on this (presumably favourite) subject, he manages to a sustain a fast-paced duet with his partner, who has for six months been slouching quietly around the barber’s shop fiddling fecklessly with his iPhone. Ostensibly he’s training but he has yet to be let loose on a customer’s barnet. Instead, he sits and listens with half an ear to the banter, pitching in as and when.

One wonders whether the training is not actually for cutting hair, but for the hairdresser’s parallel skill of maintaining enthusiastic yet meaningless monologues.

The duologue ranged breathlessly and seamlessly from “and there he was cycling unlit and wearing all-black along the Witney road”/“yeah and he does it every week”, to “they insist on cycling two-abreast”/“don’t pay road tax” and “it’d be all our fault if we hit them”/“don’t even have insurance”.

I slip in a few ripostes but it has the effect of a heckler on a pair of Edinburgh Festival hacks getting up to speed. It just eggs them on and gives them more material to go at.

Er, insured drivers texting while over the limit, anyone? I mean if there’s a crash around here it never (thankfully) seems to involve anyone on a bicycle. Inevitably it involves a few teenagers in a clapped out Micra running out of road on a Friday evening and tucking their car into a hedgerow.

Hundreds of thousands of cyclists do have insurance (mine’s through my CTC membership) and ride our bikes sensibly – take righteous umbrage at being tarred as “damned cyclists”. I mean, there are some right idiots out there driving around but we never sit around barbers’ shops slagging off “drivers” (all of ’em) for being psychopathic, road-raging, tailgating, speeding loonies.

Why is the world’s cleverest and most graceful invention so misunderstood by those reluctant to give it a go? Jealousy goes such a long way.