You can feel the atmosphere darken on the roads after it's rained. Everyone is on tenterhooks; today's commute is going to be a risky one. Brakes take longer to work and all road users need to take extra care around each other.

Dodging standing water becomes a cyclist's highest priority. It gives no indication of what might lie below or how deep the water might be, so are best avoided.

Sometimes being able to avoid these pools is a luxury in itself.

I regularly cycle down Roosevelt Drive - it's impossible to do such a gentle downwards slope anything other than 'pretty fast'. At the bottom, after anything heavier than a slight drizzle, a seasonal lake appears. I'm pretty sure there must be quite a mature ecosystem in there by now - it seems to have been a permanent feature for several weeks.

So as I'm flying down Roosevelt Drive - quite a perfect slope, hardly any need for pedal power - most of my energy is spent on working out the daily conundrum: How will I cross the water today?

On a perfect day, there will be no other traffic and I will use the opposite lane. With traffic around, this is just downright dangerous. So the choice is between getting soaked, jarring your bike on an unseen pothole or cycling into oncoming traffic. No surprise, soaking wet wins every time!

Lake Roosevelt, however, pales into insignificance when compared with the Cheney Lane swamp. The end of Cheney Lane is made completely impassable to cyclists during wet weather.

This bog doesn't just make the road completely useless for cyclists, but also makes it very tricky for cars, often meaning they are backed up to Warneford Lane.

The only choice for a cyclist here is to get off and push their bike along the pavement - most unsatisfactory.

As this particularly dangerous seasonal road lake occurs so often, I had been assuming that it is due to some kind of fault on the road. Will I ever learn not to assume?

That's the other frustrating thing about these stretches of water. Unless there is an obvious cause, it is often difficult to see why they are there at all.

This week, I decided that I should really stop assuming that these fairly busy roads are so badly designed that they flood as a matter of course after a rainfall.

So I did what I should have done straight away and reported them. I can understand people's reticence to report transport matters. It's the old 'one person won't make a difference' idea, but then we'd never complain about anything if that was really true.

Reporting a road problem to the council is just behaving as a responsible citizen.

I rang 0845 310 1111 and reported the encroaching waters and I live in hope of the problem either being solved (perhaps it is simply blocked drains?) or at least knowing why it exists.

If all I learn is that it can't be fixed, I will return to righteous indignation.