I’ve been riding bikes since I was about five years old, so that’s a fairly long time now, but I’d never had one stolen before. Of course it happened to friends and colleagues with sickening regularity and I genuinely felt their pain as they showed me photos of their former pride and joy and explained the enormous sense of bereavement they felt. And then finally it happened to me.

The annoying thing is that I had a feeling that day – a friend at work had told me how her mountain bike, treasured for many years and ridden for thousands of miles, had been lifted from Preston Park station. How the thieves had just cut through the steel lock like butter and left the remains as a cruel reminder of how powerless we are against them.