Two stints at a bank, both contracts, both up north, late 2000s. Network work — refreshing an old estate, swapping out one set of standards for the next. Hard. Well-paid. The kind of contract you go home from knackered and grateful.

It was the commute that did it. Train down each morning, train back each night. Young family at home. The time away was what the money cost. The train hours weren’t wasted — I had a law degree on the side, and tray-tables turned out to be where I read most of it. Some weeks they were the only hours I owned.

The disposable income made up for some of it. You replace a MacBook once in a while. You pay for things you couldn’t have paid for the year before. Somewhere in the middle of all this I bought a Sinclair A-bike.

The A-bike was Clive Sinclair’s late-life folding bike — small, eccentric, wheels not much bigger than dinner plates. Folded into a parcel. Unfolded into something you could, just about, ride. Mine arrived at the office one afternoon.

The office I was in was an L-shape. A small back room with my desk in it, then through a doorway into a larger open-plan area where the old-timers and the rest of the contractors sat. I unfolded the bike, got on it, and rode the diagonal — small office, through the door, across the main floor — the longest straight line I could find that didn’t have a desk or a person in it.

It got some laughs. Not big laughs, the in-the-room kind. Someone filmed it on a phone — one of those 2007-or-2009 vintages where a phone could just about manage video. Where the file ended up, I don’t know. Probably gone.

The bank itself I liked. The people were good. The work was interesting. The only real downside, honestly, was the train home.

Looking back, I don’t know how it was possible at the pace it ran at. Full-time contract, young child, a law degree on the side, and somewhere in the middle of it an afternoon when I rode a folding bike across an office floor because I owned one and I could.

It got easier later. Work-from-home became a real thing, then the default. Less train. More evenings at home. A pace a person can actually live at.

The bike, last I checked, still folds.