This is the first in a new London Magazine series of articles, in which a variety of writers will describe what living in London – or visiting it – means to them. Our first contributor was until recently the Parliamentary sketch writer for the Daily Telegraph.

With the strenuousness, and faint desire for risk, that so often afflict the middle aged, I decided to become a bicyclist. My London became the streets between Gospel Oak and the Palace of Westminster. Each morning I rode off with mingled boldness and timidity. My children laughed at the old-fashioned way in which I flung my leg over the saddle. Because of my inexperience it was hard to tell whether I could fit through the narrow space between other vehicles and the kerb. Sometimes I would hang back behind a bus, too frightened to pull out and conduct the grand outflanking manoeuvre on the other side of the road which would win me my freedom. The bus drivers treated me with consideration. They behaved as if they did not wish to run me over. The people who shocked me were the other bicyclists. They seemed to think they had a right to dash about all over the road and pavement, and that everyone else must give way to them. It did not worry me that they broke the law. What annoyed me was their bad manners.
My first accident was with another bicyclist who tried at high speed to overtake me. He clipped my back wheel and fell off. It was a shock to turn round and see him lying in the road. To my relief, he was able to stand up. None of his bones was broken, but he was badly shaken. He said he thought I was going to turn left down Endell Street. I said on the contrary, I had signalled that I was going to continue into Shaftesbury Avenue. He said he had not seen my signal, and in any case I should have been further over. I offered to buy him a brandy. He declined my offer.

Before long, London’s bicyclists ceased to alarm me. Perhaps this meant I had become one of them. I discovered that once you know how to do it, jiggling in and out of the traffic is reasonable behaviour. Soon I was enjoying the sense of extended range which a bicycle confers on someone used to walking. The wearisome tracts of Bloomsbury, the parts which London University seems to have sterilised, were soon traversed, and even these possess their charms. In Taviton Street I admired the intricate, almost exotic symmetry of the brick-built UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, opened in 2005. Sometimes I spared a thought for Hugh Price Hughes (1847-1902), Methodist Preacher and defender of the Nonconformist Conscience, who is commemorated by a blue plaque. In Malet Street, where the University of London Union maintains a subterranean swimming pool, I might think with affection of Peter Cooper, the sergeant-majorly figure who taught our oldest child how to swim and had a genius for keeping the mothers of north London under control. At the back of the British Museum, I would feel a twinge of pity for the dutiful tourists as they consulted their maps, and would wonder if the new extension to the museum is going to be any good. Emerging into Bedford Square, I would resolve to find out more about Lord Eldon (1751-1838), staunch opponent of reform.

Seven Dials, St Martin’s Lane, Trafalgar Square and Whitehall brought growing numbers of tourists in search of London, and perhaps a Chinese honeymoon couple taking each other’s picture in front of Big Ben. As I waited at the lights at the edge of Parliament Square, I removed my Palace of Westminster pass from my shirt, so that it could hang freely round my neck on its metal chain. One day I saw a junior minister, a Tory, walking slowly across the road in front of me. He was smoking a cigarette and looked glum. He thought that by now he would be a senior minister. When the lights changed, I coasted to the gates of New Palace Yard, signalling my intention to ride through them. ‘Mind the bike,’ a friendly police officer shouted, and I rang my bell, and the tourists who were having their pictures taken with the police officers parted to allow me, thanks to my pass, onto parliamentary territory. I rode on past the Catalpa trees, bumping over the security apparatus where cars are searched, and parked my bike in the racks on Speaker’s Green.

The Palace of Westminster is full of disappointed men and women. They have taken great trouble to get there, only to find on arrival that they do not matter. But the building itself is sublime. This is London in its glory as the seat of Parliament. To someone like myself who believes our liberties are ancient liberties, which we have inherited, and from which no jack in office can disinherit us, it provides mid-nineteenth-century reassurance. From 2004 to 2011 I was lucky enough to work here as the Daily Telegraph’s sketchwriter. I have now returned as a contributing editor to ConservativeHome, and feel even more pleased to be back than I expected. Perhaps the possession of a parliamentary pass encourages a not quite healthy feeling that one is an insider, a member of the club. But it is to me a delightful club, where one bumps into people one would actually like to talk to. I am so devoted to it that I even enjoy listening from the press gallery to the debates. The only thing that upsets me is the glass screen which shuts off the public gallery at the other end of the Chamber. It was installed after a panic about chemical warfare, but did not prevent a man from gaining access to another gallery and throwing a flour-filled condom which hit Tony Blair on the shoulder. Our ancient right to throw things at the Prime Minister cannot long be denied.

On coming home in the evening, I pass up Tottenham Court Road, a dreary throughfare. Once I bumped into Boris Johnson, and once, stupefied, I saw a beautiful girl ride up the street, not heeding the red lights, but watching her own reflection in the windows.

My second bicycle accident occurred on another route to north London, Royal College Street, and involved another bicyclist. My wife Sally and I had been at one party and were on our way to another. She was a few yards ahead of me. As we approached the major junction with Camden Road, overshadowed by a massive railway bridge and notorious for accidents, we heard a siren. From somewhere away to our right, an emergency vehicle was getting nearer. It sounded as if we had time to cross Camden Road. We put on speed. Anxious not to trail behind, I applied maximum power and was only a foot or two behind Sally when she saw a police car was almost upon us. She braked sharply and I crashed into the back of her and fell to the ground. Perhaps because of the wine I had taken, I seemed not to fall too heavily. As I scrambled to my feet, giving thanks not to have been hit by the police car, and picked up my bike, she said in a fury: ‘You broke my mudguard.’