I’m still renting in Garsington, and the builders are still rebuilding my house. Bob (his real name) the builder and Martin the brass-band-playing plumber have been there every day for seven weeks now, smashing and cutting and welding and bolting the house back into shape.

It’s nearly done now and we are more than ready to move back. Pity about the previously polished floorboards, but at least I’ll no longer get into trouble for storing muddy mountain bikes in the dining room.

Commuting five miles each way has been a welcome change from my usual homeworker habits. I don’t know what’s worse: rain or heatwave.

The rain required a depressing amount of preparation and clobber: I used to feel like I was dressing in scuba gear to cycle to my temporary office in James Street.

These hot, dry days would, you’d think, be perfect for cycling. Indeed, the warm air blow-dries my showered hair as I career down the steep hill from Garsington.

Once in Cowley, I am faced with queues of hot and bothered drivers. Sure, I get to weave past them, but it means arriving in James Street plastered in a slather of sweat and dust.

I tried to avoid the heat and the hassle of the Cowley Road melee by using Roman Way, the two millennia-old route through what is now the BMW factory.

This bridleway linked Transport Way (near Johnson’s Buildbase) with the industrial estate on Horspath Road, from where you cross the ring road and pick up the wonderfully leafy and car-free Barracks Lane to reach downtown Cowley Road.

You can still see the route marked on Google maps and I spent a fruitless half-hour one morning getting lost in the Unipart complex, trying to find the southern entrance to Roman Way. That evening I succeeded in finding the start of Roman Way from Horspath Road and sailed past a guarded barrier with a wave and a smile.

At the other end of the track, heavily laden car-transporters were queuing to leave the BMW site into Transport Way. The guard didn’t want to let me through. The bridleway no longer existed, he explained, and I needed to go all the way back through the BMW works to the entrance I’d come in by.

This didn’t make sense. If the site had become a high security area, why send me back through it?

Anyway, I wasn’t about to cycle three miles back through the factory and along the replacement bridleway alongside the ring road, to get back to Transport Way.

We discussed the matter for a few minutes, but as he started to close the huge mechanised gates, I realised he’d lost the argument. I cycled through and went on my way.

I remember at the time, Cyclox accepting BMW’s logic that it made little difference to cyclists to go through or round the BMW site.

The horse riders, who are also allowed to use bridleways, did object and I now wish the cyclists had too. Getting from Garsington and environs into the city would have been a whole lot more pleasant along that bridleway.

RIP Roman Way.