Imagine if we actually managed to achieve all our News Year Resolutions? If there was one magical year where, we all learned to speak Spanish, read more books, took more exercise, sky dived over the Blue Mountains, and plucked up the courage to ask out Samantha from the photography department.

What kind of a nauseating world would we lived in if it was populated by smug, self righteous individuals with flat stomachs and advanced educations rushing to and fro to their gym instruction appointments or life painting classes or AA meetings. What about the self-loathing? Wither the stench of failure?

Resolutions are there, like the proverbial rule, to be broken. It's around this time of year where the front yards of Croydon along with many other metropolises around the UK, start to fill up with abandoned walking machines, the complete works of William Shakespeare, the Writers and Artists Handbook 2009, pink handcuffs and of course, bicycles.

The bicycle represents both British Olympic glory and abject failure in equal measure. Every year the good people of Cycle King, Halfords, Evans and the like (other cycle shops are available) must greet January rubbing their hands together with glee as pot bellied adults roll in through the door, clutching soon be hard earned plastic credits in their hands determined that this is the year that it is going to different.

People like me in fact.

True enough, late last December I trekked down to my nearest cycle pusher and obtained a sexy black sleek mountain bike (sort of). Brimming with excitement and with my head full of grand ideas of afternoon rides through the Surrey Downs and perhaps, one day, even riding the London-to-Brighton bike ride, I set off on the short journey from the High Street to my home on the other side of Selsdon Road.

The whole experience must have taken about an hour. The ride itself couldn't have been more than five minutes. It was the lying flat-out on the sofa trying to keep my lungs from leaping out of my body and curling up under the radiator next to the cat, that part took ages.

The following day, I took a slightly longer tour, with similar results and while I took last week off due the sheer ludicrosity of the weather, I resolved to get back on my bike on Sunday for an extended journey which again, I stress, must have taken no longer the ten minutes of my life but resulted on it all flashing before me.

As I sat hunched over the dining table, gasping for breath it did occur to me that I'd made a terrible mistake and parted with a not inconsiderable sum of cash on a white elephant. However, the look of barely disguised contempt on my wife's face as she surveyed the physical wreck once known as her husband convinced not to put the For Sale sign up just yet.

Nope, the road will be long and humiliating but I'm determined this time to restore some semblance of fitness. At the very least I'd like to make it to the Purley Arms and back.