Peter Askew at GoodBrand & Company, the brand consultancy which has been working with Good Energy, trades the tube for two wheels thanks to the new London bike rental scheme.

I don’t know about you, but it’s not often I get to try new stuff. Most of my days are prescheduled, my experiences preconditioned, even my responses predefined. So Monday was exciting because I tried out something for the first time: London’s shiny new cycle scheme.

It was exhilarating at many levels - and least of all the obvious lunacy of taking my life into my hands, helmetless, on an unwieldy big-boned Boris-bike on the capital’s crazy flyways. Pulling out of the back streets of Paddington into central London’s high-speed two-way cycle lanes, I entered a fast, purposeful slipstream of everyday commuter cyclists. It felt a bit like waking up into Monday as a living cell pumping through the city’s arteries. It felt very different to every other day’s shuffling, inching, zombiesque, into the pungent coffin-like Tube 20 metres under..

But beyond that, and the overwhelming feeling of speed and vigour, was the proud sense of joining a movement to which I hadn’t previously belonged. Now, having recently worked with Good Energy to brand its difference vs all other utilities companies, I’ll try not to work this one too hard… but for me there are three clear parallels between my Monday experience and that of joining Good Energy’s homegrown energy movement:

1. You’re joining other people that know what you know. There’s an immediate bond of shared values - a new more sensible code of conduct - and the inevitable resulting sense of camaraderie.

2. You experience a real sense of positive purpose, of waking out of sleepwalking. By joining a movement of many you’re reminded of your own identity and freedom to act. There’s a feeling of self-determination, of social emancipation, an exercising of your political rights.

3. But perhaps the most notable observation is this: These infrastructures, once tested and fine-tuned, get scaled up, rolled out and rapidly spawn creative competitive marketplaces. Actually that’s what’s happening right now with the burgeoning city cycle scheme sector across Europe.

Good Energy is creating a homegrown energy movement which is proving there’s a new kind of market and infrastructure that can work. It’s still really a beta experiment, whose imminent next phase is scale-up and roll-out.

That’s the sense of movement: being a part of a purposeful self-enhancing idea for the future.