YOU are only as old as you feel, and I feel pretty good at the moment, thanks very much.

In fact, I am lighter and fitter than at any time in the last 14 years – or, to put it another way, since I was in my 30s.

The reason is cycling, which I have to say I have become pretty hooked on, just lately. Indeed, I don’t think I have ever enjoyed physical exercise as much in my whole life as much as I have this year.

So I wholeheartedly endorse an excellent publication by an organisation called Get Cycling, which is appropriately called Get Cycling… In Swindon, and which I was recently given a copy of.

It’s 32 whole A4 pages of reasons to take up the sport, and – as I have said here before – nowhere in the UK can be a better place to do it than Swindon, on account of it being so blessed with so many nice cycle paths.

You can get to almost anywhere from anywhere in the town and hardly have to venture on to a road.

But sometimes there is a danger of getting carried away with things, and Get Cycling… In Swindon, quite frankly, falls into the trap.

One of the articles, which tries to set the scene for cycling around town begins: “It’s not too hilly…”

Pardon me, but it certainly is hilly. The clue is in the name. Swindon – that’s short for Swinedown or Pighill.

The pigs have gone, but the hill is still there, and will be for the foreseeable future.

The other names around town give it away too. Toothill, Penhill, St Andrew’s Ridge, Upper Stratton. There is hardly a flat road in the whole place.

When you’ve seen it from a saddle, you soon realise that sections you can sail along when you’re behind a wheel, like Thamesdown Drive, can be deceptively hilly.

It’s no better just outside town, with more places built on top of hills, such as Chiseldon and Blunsdon. And there is a reason why Highworth isn’t called Lowworth.

What the book should have said about hills is this: there are loads of them, but once you’ve been cycling around town for a little while, you stop noticing them so much because your technique is better, but mainly because of your fitness.

I have been pleasantly surprised to find that, although I’m now well into my 50s, it’s not only possible to get much fitter than you probably thought was possible, but also much more quickly than you imagined.

All you need is regular exercise. And if that exercise is cycling, sooner or later something pretty weird happens and you find you start enjoying going uphill. Rather than avoiding hills or swearing at them, I actually relish them and sometimes even go out of my way to go up one, so I can have the satisfaction of getting to the top.

Hills are no big deal if you are fit, and as most bikes today have more gears than Elizabeth Taylor has had husbands, the technology helps.

I officially began liking hills a few weeks back when, after cycling a particularly steep (but short) one on the path to Chiseldon, I returned an hour later, going the other way.

As I started to whizz down it, I saw a couple of people coming up it, pushing their bikes. By my reckoning, they were each a third of my age.

They would be too young to understand, but us oldies know the Hovis advert was right.

It is possible to go up that hill as fast as you come down.