It was a Friday in late summer, but it was like all my Christmases had come at once. Right up there behind my wedding, the birth of my children and riding my first CBX. That Friday was the day I got my driving licence back after a year’s break – not for doing anything naughty, I hasten to add, but on doctor’s orders.

It started with a scan that showed my melanoma (a more serious form of skin cancer) had spread internally to a few parts of my body in the form of small “nodes”. One of them showed up in my brain, sadly, and the doctor said no more driving or riding from that moment on. It was just a precaution, in case I had a seizure or something, which happily I never did.

In practical terms, it was no big deal. My wonderful wife became my chauffeur overnight, and getting from A to B was never a problem. But if your main hobby has been riding motorcycles and driving cars, losing your licence is quite a blow. Having independent transport has been part of everyday life since my 16th birthday 50 years ago, and I’ve taken it for granted.

The only important thing was that the doctors zapped the offending node a few weeks later with a targeted 30-minute dose of radiation, and got rid of it completely. A few months later, the even better news was that my course of immunotherapy had got rid of all the cancer, which was an occasion for great joy. But this is not a tale of cancer: it’s a tale of getting a driving licence back after it’s been taken away.

It’s not as easy as you might imagine. The doctor had the power to say “don’t drive”, and that was that: 10 seconds of conversation. Getting back on the road ain’t so easy. It’s not up to the doctor but to the DVLA (for any overseas readers, that’s the UK’s driver licensing agency). My doctor wrote to the DVLA on 19 March this year telling them that in his opinion I was fine to drive again – in time for spring. Yay! Unfortunately, the Covid-19 lockdown happened four days later. It would take five months, two questionnaires and umpteen phone calls to get my licence back. That Friday a few weeks ago I called yet again, and a lovely Welsh accent told me: “I have good news for you, Mr Rae.” Those are the sweetest eight words I’ve heard in a long time. Result!

It was raining, of course, while most of the intervening months had been dry and sunny, and the Valkyrie was way too clean to get dirty. So I got to drive our car for the first time since we’d bought it a year ago, and decided it was jolly nice. By Saturday the roads had dried out and I took the bike to the nearest garage to put air in the tyres and fill the tank. It was like meeting an old friend after a long absence.

It wasn’t all plain sailing. The engine sounded and felt a bit rough, like it was starved of fuel, but the ever-helpful folk on the Valkyrie Riders Cruiser Club group on Facebook suggested several fuel-system-cleaning remedies. One was horribly expensive and would take days to arrive, one was cheaper but would still take days to arrive, so I bought my first-ever bottle of STP (remember STP?) and that improved the carburetion. Still a bit sub-par, but pretty good.

It was all quite a schlep, the licence thing. I don’t question for a moment the need for a doctor to be able to take people off the road in an instant if they pose or might pose a risk to others. But I do question why it should take five and a half months in total for the same doctor’s judgement that it’s safe to drive again to be put into effect. Even a pandemic like Covid-19 shouldn’t mean that the DVLA effectively shuts up shop for three months or more and deals only with “key workers”.

Anyway, the bike is taxed and insured, I’m licensed once more, and days of open road and endless sunshine beckon. Maybe.