Something is definitely up. All my adult life, I have been used to feeling, well, a bit of a freak for going everywhere by bike. Whatever function you arrived at, you were always conscious of being the odd one out: everyone else was better dressed, not conspicuously perspiring and not toting a bulky bag full of waterproofs, mini-pump and bike lights. Those like me have just had to put up with the fact that the rest of the world regarded us as somewhere between harmless eccentrics and foolhardy sociopaths.

But change is afoot: cycling is good news. Last week, there was the record-breaking copper. PC Diederik Coetzee has been striking fear into the criminal classes of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire, by charging about on a bicycle arresting them all. The average bobby makes fewer than 10 arrests a year; the South African emigré has collared more than 300 suspects already in 2005. Mountain Bike Maurice, our local hero is popularly known as.

Yet the most glaring example of the new trend was when Tory leadership hopeful David Cameron was widely photographed a couple of weeks ago astride his bicycle. In the past, this would have been political death. Sure, it was OK for Boris Johnson to wobble around town on a bike because his whole image is old-school daffy. But with Cameron it has become a signifier of being just the sort of get-up-and-go, with-it, modern politician the Conservative party needs. As Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley noted: “When William Hague tried to advertise his zest by wearing a baseball cap, he was judged to be horribly naff; when Dave Cameron gets himself pictured in a cycling helmet he is treated as the acme of cool.”

But it’s not just that cycling is no longer uncool; it’s much bigger than that. Cycling is the coming thing, and cyclists are the new ruling class. As ever, America is a decade ahead of us: George Bush is a born-again mountain biker (the luckless John Kerry a keen roadie). Bikes rock and bikes rule. I should be over the moon, but somehow I was happier when we were outlaws and weirdos.

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