Being deposited far away from your comfort zone and getting to grips with a brand new life forces you to re-look at things you’ve long taken as read. Stuff that seemed obvious and set in stone suddenly won’t make sense in a new context, and in a way it’s adapt or die – a spot of Darwinism both for you and for the ideas that don’t work anymore.

As kids, we get used to this kind of thing: when you leave your mother’s apron strings to go to school; every time you move on to another new school; moving on to the wider world – your first job and every first day thereafter. We are programmed to re-programme: update our software with each new circumstance – every new nickname, set of arbitrary rules and traditions – so that it stays functional.

I suspect it gets easier to adapt every time you do this: slough off the old expectations, exit that particular comfort zone, and start afresh. These changes are actually pretty exciting. You see things with fresh eyes; there are new sounds and smells. It’s all extra vivid and mysterious. Even the language differs subtly, which reflects different social situations and norms. It’s stimulating to get to grips with it all – apart from the times when you sit among a bunch of people with no idea of what they’re saying.

And whenever you take these changes on board – upgrade yourself, it’s tempting to think – you become someone a little different; a little new. Thus do we blossom and grow.

So here’s a little marker of the changes that we have made and which have been thrust upon us. As before, let me beg you to bear with me a little. This is a bit left-field, a little specific, but I’m saying that it’s the left-field and specific that sometimes crystallise these changes.

Way back in the early 90s when I arrived in the UK, the sport of mountain biking was really taking off. I was very keen to try it but it took a while to save and borrow enough money to buy a bike. Before doing this, I pored over the various magazines devoted to pedalling through the mud and grit, becoming obsessively au fait with all the brands, the pros and cons of various frame materials, etc. etc. ad infinitum.

The first bike was fantastic and I used it as much for commuting between various casual cash-in-hand jobs as I did riding it through whatever mud and grit I could find. And then it was stolen: a gutting experience, not least because it wasn’t paid off yet.

It was a while before I bought another, but once in regular employment in the City, where an annual bonus was paid, I get back into the game with a beautiful bright orange steed (made by a company called Orange, just to be obtuse) which was gradually upgraded until not much of the original remained except the frame – and it was a thing of joy, until it was stolen.

Anyway, this isn’t meant to be a list of bikes (we’ve only just begun on that – we’d need a few more pages to do it justice) – it’s about pedals. This beautiful orange Orange came with a set of what’s known as clipless pedals, which is something of a misnomer as they are specifically designed to clip your feet firmly to the pedal by means of an ingenious cleat under your shoe.

These pedals are something of a marker to those in the know – a separator of the men from the boys, the serious cycling wheat from the merely pootling chaff. Combined with the right stiff-soled shoe, they enable much more efficient power transfer, with the ability to lift the pedals upward as well as pushing them down – as well as positioning the foot precisely over the pedal axle (see? It’s pretty specific stuff).

But they also take a bit of mastering. The key part is disengaging the foot from the pedal when you come to a stop, which is necessary for supporting yourself in an upright position when forward momentum has ceased. It’s similar to the bindings on ski boots – the right twisty motion and they pop free quite easily. My first attempt at this trick resulted in a slow, embarrassing topple to the tarmac and a pair of bloody palms – which is why cyclists wear those padded mitts as well.

In the interests of brevity, I’ll spare you a long dissertation on the different kinds of pedals, cleats, and shoes – ones for road-riding vs. mountain biking, double- vs. single-sided, etc. The point here is that when you’re kitting up for a long ride, on- or off-road, it’s no big thing to don a pair of stiff-soled shoes, often fastened with Velcro and buckles for added stylishness, that make you walk like a duck. But when you just want to pop down the shops or nip round the in-laws for a cup of sugar, that’s what’s called overkill.

So having shipped my precious steel-framed mountain bike from London (where I built it in the living room of my flat) to Singapore (where it went largely unridden), to Braidwood, I found it was still not being ridden and it was all because of those shoes. Make no mistake, they’re the best for rides of the weekend warrior genre, but they’re just not very country chic and walking like a duck is no way to establish yourself with the locals as a solid citizen.

So yesterday I shelled out for what’s known in the trade as ‘flatties’ with a view to riding the bike on a more hop-on hop-off basis, unencumbered by cleats, Velcro and buckles – not to mention the lycra that makes non-cyclists so uncomfortable. And today I installed them – so there’s no excuse not to take the now-retro MTB out on the byways and fire trails of the local area.

So there you have it – a seemingly-trivial detail that signals how far we’ve come. Flatties would have been unthinkable in the years when pseudo-serious biking was the name of the game; showing up to a weekend ride with those on the bike would have led to some rapid flash judgements on my skills, seriousness, sanity and ability to hang with the pack. But in Braidwood, they make good sense and they’ve given an old bike a life – not to mention its old rider.