Riding to work just seems obvious from this range: an easy 15 minutes from Fitzroy to the Southbank home of the ABC. It’s one of the true and simple pleasures of the inner-urban life. It has its risks of course, all road riding does.In years of doing this on many different routes of wildly varying duration, I’ve (searching hastily for touchable wood) not been doored yet. Most weeks there’s a near miss, with a parked car opening the driver’s door just ahead; a potentially deadly space, filled by the sudden sound of me. Swearing.

You learn to make a quick, close study of car interiors as you approach and pass: is there still someone in there, are they looking up or down? Texting? Oh no. Where possible, you steer a door’s width away – following traffic and the width of lanes permitting – an ounce of prevention being better than a bloodied pavement. Doors are one thing, pedestrians another. Oblivious, preoccupied, distracted or simply stupid, they just swan out in front of you. In office hours it’s bad enough, but once a week, before my Sunday morning stint at Radio National, I ride through the city in the pre-dawn. At just past 5am the pedestrians are oblivious, preoccupied, distracted … and drunk. Shouty, angry knots of young men spill onto the street from the last handful of clubs still doofing with the dawn chorus of starlings and mynahs down Bourke St. They hang at corners, form cocky, swaying clumps in the still empty tram tracks. It’s probably just my paranoia, but this Sunday morning scene carries a note of menace. You’re right, it’s just my paranoia.

Picking my way down Swanston Street I’m imagining an alternative to my usual nightmare scenario of a beery ‘what are looking at mate?’ (him) followed by several blocks of frantic pedaling (me). In this admittedly fevered imagining there is a cry of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ followed by the swish of a scimitar (quick, preferable) or alternatively, the stubby hacking of a short, sharp knife as I’m pulled off my bike backwards by the chin. I’m thinking these dark, bloody thoughts as I close on the intersection of Collins Street where maybe 20 police and half a dozen cars have corralled a single dark colored sedan on the Town Hall curb. The scene is drenched in adrenalin and lit in a strobing throb of red and blue. I trace a wide circle round some very edgy police. Time slows, all motion elongated. The scene feels like that car crash in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart. I’m Nicholas Cage, on a bike, without the Chris Isaak soundtrack and no sign of Laura Dern. Retracing my route in broad daylight hours later I see nothing but sunshine, smiling families and purposeful Sunday shoppers. I decide this is a better than useful metaphor for the entire equation of risk and reality in the new age of terror.

Monday morning is with the horse as usual, a routine made less urgent by the end of the hunt season. Closing hunt had been a vigorous affair of better than 20 fences and two kills in open country, the foxes opting, with a fatal lack of cunning, to keep away from the suburban estate fences that now run just a paddock beyond the shrubby creek the club’s hounds have hunted since 1888. Not for much longer in these parts, as the people press in. In any event not before next autumn. So no need today for the dull repetition of fitness work, the staple of our riding through winter’s hunt season: trot and canter laps followed by trot and canter laps, enlivened by the possibility of canter and trot laps and idle jumping. OK, so I’m a creature of habit.

Picking up the lad’s lumped and scattered poo from the muddy night yard, I hatch a plan to at last put some work into our dressage, which is to say trot and canter circles rather than laps. The day presses. I’m filling in for Waleed Aly on RN Drive, so work will make an unruly intrusion on both days off and riding time. Keen as only a fill-in can be I’m in the office by 12.30, then reading and pre-recording all afternoon. The talk of politics is still terror and national security. We struggle to get government talent, as ever, but finally line up Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm and opposition defence spokesman David Feeney to begin the show, a combination that raises many questions, the most prominent being “how do you pronounce Leyonhjelm?”.

With the US striking hard into Syria overnight we’re hoping to probe the opposition attitude to what must be a more than vague possibility of mission creep, perhaps a future ADF deployment. I don’t get beyond the pleasantries when Feeney’s phone dies, leaving me with nothing but my imagination and a screen of texts, all of which seem to be sledging the government in what will presumably strike Gerard Henderson as a welter of green/left bias. Agonised silence is not a good look on radio. So I talk; for what seems an eternity. It feels like the Rand Paul Fillibuster. At last our next guest is on the line. It’s Lie-on-helm, by the way.

On Tuesday evening I resign on air, just as a laugh. I’m told it was more than convincing. Somewhat disturbingly my boss doesn’t call for reassurance. More flatwork in the morning, and through the week. By Friday we can manage a sequence of cantered figure of eights. I’m thrilled, the horse bored witless. On radio I manage somehow to leave Cory Bernardi sounding like the voice of reason when he argues for a Parliament House burqua ban. A fail. The next day I make Mathias Cormann cross when I give my best Sarah Ferguson (not a very good one) over the budget blow out. But he’ll be back. It’s grand final week here and I have a cunning plan that involves a couch, a television and party pies. I wonder idly whether terror unspoken remains terrifying, watch Tom Jones warble an ancient ditty of domestic violence and revenge, chew a pie and wait for the game.