The Valkyrie was stuck. It wouldn’t move. The front discs were locked solid. The advice online was to hit the calipers with a mallet to free them up, which worked fine until I squeezed the lever again and we were back to square one.

My first reaction was to get a professional mechanic to sort it out: I’d never worked on brakes before, and it’s not the sort of job you want to get wrong. The only bike mechanic close by couldn’t look at it for three weeks, so I did what every self-respecting individual would do these days: I resorted to Google and YouTube. There was nothing specific on fixing Valkyrie brakes, but I found something for a similar Honda and set about the task.

The right-hand caliper came off with a bit of encouragement, and I duly followed instructions. I squeezed the brake lever to get the twin pistons out. One moved, one didn’t. The advice was to block the one that was moving with a piece of wood and get the other one out, which worked like a charm. The piston was covered in crud, so I cleaned that up, took out the two seals, cleaned out the lands (the grooves in which they sit), inserted new seals and reinserted the now-gleaming piston. This home mechanic stuff is easy!

My video instructor told me to block the clean piston and extract the remaining dirty one. Hah! The brake ever came back to the handlebar and pushed nothing out. Air in the brake lines, I guessed. More online research told me I needed to use compressed air to force the piston out, and that’s not something my humble garage possesses. I was about to head off on holiday and didn’t need the bike till I got back, so I took a break and on my return it was back to the professional, cap in hand: “Help!”

Steve of S&G Motorcycles in Middlewich is an accomplished bike mechanic. He asked me to bring him the calipers, and it took him just two hours to get the pistons out in his workshop, clean them up, insert new seals and then re-install the calipers on the Valkyrie in the comfort of my garage. I’d bought new disc pads, too, for the surprisingly affordable cost of about £21 a pair from Hunts, the Honda main dealer in Manchester.

You know all those warning/advice labels that come on bikes? Yeah, well I never bother reading them either. I’ve owned three Valkyries over a combined period of 15 years, and each one has an engraved message right there on top of the shiny aluminium front brake master cylinder lid: “Use only DOT 4.0 brake fluid.” I’ve seen it so many times but never registered the information, so I’d been to Halfords and bought 500 ml of DOT 5.1 brake fluid (the only one they seemed to stock, as it happens) in readiness for getting the bike back on the road. Steve, fortunately, knew better and had brought some DOT 4.0 fluid with him, so I watched with considerable interest as he bled the brakes back to normal operation. Again, not a job I’d done before. It was such a joy to get the bike back on the road, just in the nick of time for a planned trip to Ireland the next day.

The weather, which had been balmy by late March standards the previous week, had taken a turn for the worse and was promising -1C the following morning. Having seen how easy it is to find yourself sliding on black ice on Manchester’s motorway network, I didn’t much fancy a pre-dawn trip across North Wales at below-zero temperatures to catch the ferry, so with great reluctance the bike had to stay in the garage and instead we flew to Ireland for a few days. The hassle with post-Covid airport security delays, a miserable Irish car-rental agency and an unbelievable grubby and inhospitable Dublin airport made me resolve that in future we go by bike or not at all. The stuff that non-bikers have to put up with!

Still, the Valkyrie celebrates its 20^th birthday this year with a mere 30,000 miles on the clock and will, all things being equal, take us on at least one European camping trip this summer. Can’t wait!