I’m 67 years old but I’ve been feeling a bit like a child counting the days to Christmas. For me, the long-awaited presents are my Honda Rune and Ducati Sport Classic, due to arrive in Middlewich after a journey that began 11 weeks ago on the Garden Route of South Africa’s Western Cape.

Regular readers will be aware of the ups and downs of the process, but my concerns over the arrival of the bikes didn’t end when the ship finally docked at London Gateway, the port on the Thames Estuary in Essex. Oh no.

First comes the tracker confirmation that the ship has actually berthed alongside the quay. Yay! I wait patiently for about 24 hours to give the shipper time to get the cargo off. The ship sets sail again about 10 hours later. The shipper confirms that the container is off the ship and that the bikes have been cleared through Customs. Double yay!

I’m thinking, ports are super-efficient, and the constant throughput of containers means they can’t have my bikes laying around there for long, so they’ll probably be on the road tomorrow – or, worst case, the day after. Hah! Not so fast. It seems that someone else’s cargo inside the same container hasn’t yet cleared Customs, so unloading the container has to wait until that has cleared, too. That takes eight days. Then the shipper says they can’t get a haulier to move the bikes the 200-odd miles from Essex to Cheshire until 5 July – which is a further 10 days away!

Look, freight isn’t really my field, although I did a stint in that industry as a PR adviser about 20 years ago, but I would have thought a shipper would know what was coming through and when, and have the requisite vehicles on hand to move the goods onward. A friend tells me there’s a shortage of HGV drivers in the UK right now, so maybe there’s a shortage of large van drivers too – thanks, Amazon, for creaming off the talent!

A driver and van is eventually found and booked, and now he’s delivered the bikes to our driveway. He specialises in motorcycle transport, which is a relief, and it takes him no time to unload the machines. I’m delighted, of course – I haven’t even seen these bikes since the start of the Covid lockdown in March 2020, when we had to cut short a trip to South Africa and high-tail it back to Blighty. And I haven’t ridden them since June 2019, due to such diverse factors as my health and the unrideable state of the dirt road to our house down there.

Anyway, here they are. I scrutinise every inch to check for shipping damage. The Ducati looks flawless but the battery is flat, so I connect a charger. The Honda actually fires up at the touch of the button, and the mellifluous sound of the 1,832cc flat six bellows out of those two massive exhaust pipes – awesome! There’s a very small new scratch on the rear mudguard, and the brushed aluminium pivot cover down near the right footrest has scratches that weren’t there before. Apart from these, though, it too looks unaffected by its long journey. Tyre pressure are low all round, but that’s easily put right.

I spend many hours washing and then polishing both bikes. The Ducati is easy, having little in the way of bodywork; the Rune takes the bulk of the time, because the weeks sitting on docks or in the container have made all that chrome look a bit dull – but that’s why God invented Autosol! That Honda gets polished better than I’ve ever cleaned a bike before, hard-to-reach spots and all, and ends up looking truly magnificent. The Autosol tube ends up almost empty.

There’s a bizarre-looking piece of bright orange webbed strap hanging between the header pipes on the right-hand side. The only possible explanation for its presence is that it had been used to tie down the bike at some point in its travels, although there’s no logic to its placement. Tying down the bike through that area makes no sense at all. Someone clearly couldn’t get the strap off again and so has cut it with a knife just below the pipes. Closer investigation shows that the material has in fact melted into the headers, and it takes some careful poking and scraping to detach it completely. Fortunately the point of melting is behind the headers, and they’re hidden in turn behind bolt-on chrome covers.

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I’ve managed to get the two bikes insured on my Valkyrie policy using just the VIN numbers, thanks to a really helpful agent named Nathan at Carole Nash. However, they would be insured only for a trip to and from a pre-booked MOT test. It’s very tempting and totally legal to book them in for the tests some 50 miles away and enjoy the ride there and back, but the weather forecast is for rain showers and I don’t want to spoil all that gleaming chrome and paintwork, so I wuss out and book them into a great MOT centre, DC Lomas, just two miles from my house. They both pass with flying colours – the tester described them as perfect – and they make it home without catching a speck of dirt or water.

You’d think I could now apply to have them registered, but no. Again, not so fast! I have to wait until Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) issue a thing called a NOVA certificate for each bike. The bikes were landed and processed on 15 June; the NOVA certificates were issued on 15 July. You wouldn’t want to be in a hurry! Anyhow, with all the paperwork now to hand, I send everything off to the DVLA in Swansea. Not being able to ride the machines again until the DVLA issues their registration numbers is a pain: I’ve already paid in full for their insurance, MOTs, registration fees and 12 months’ road tax. It’s not like anybody is missing out financially, and the MOT engineer says the bikes are in perfect shape. Oh, and we have a mini heatwave… I’ll just have to be good and ride the Valkyrie!