Chaos. Sheer utter chaos. That’s what you get when the Council puts up a pair of temporary traffic lights for a day. We’re not used to traffic lights in West Wight. There’s only one set on the road to Newport, plus a pedestrian crossing that people often don’t bother to use, as the traffic is relatively light.

The traffic on the ‘main’ road through our hamlet is certainly light at this time of the year. It’s not always the case – in summer we often have to wait to cross the road until a procession of at least five cars have passed. This time of year, you only get the occasional local driving past. The Council could have easily filled the pothole with just a few barriers to block off one side of the road – the side that has cars parked along it already. But the Council had Health and Safety foremost on its mind.

And I can’t blame them. For we are on the edge of motorist civilisation here. This is Elderly Driver Territory, a wild and dangerous place. Last year, on two occasions, two elderly men managed to write off their cars by crashing them into the Co-op supermarket whilst parking. One of them did it with such force that he brought down part of the supermarket wall. And then there was the elderly man who was driving along the coast road in broad daylight, but somehow drove off the road into a field. Once in the field he became disorientated and drove around in circles trying to decide how to get back onto the road. He made the wrong choice. His car fell off the cliff. Luckily it was not one of the highest, so he escaped. (He attributed his misfortune, when interviewed by the paper, to ‘mysterious forces’, because only that morning a picture of a black cat had fallen inexplicably off his lounge wall and smashed.)

So the Council err understandably on the side of caution. Unfortunately, it seems their staff aren’t accustomed to traffic lights either. When I returned home from a shopping trip, both lights were on red, with a small queue of two or three cars behind each set. God knows how long those drivers had patiently sat there. There was no sign of road rage, no claxoning of horns, no rude gestures. Just patience.

My street runs parallel to this road. As luck would have it, the entrance to my street was alongside the last cars in the queue so I pulled alongside them and drove to my house. By the time I had reversed in and started to unload the shopping, the last two cars in the queue appeared. Evidently, my actions had flipped a light switch: rat run, they thought exultantly, as they worked out that if they drove down my street, they could exit it on the other side of the traffic lights.

Sadly for the would-be rats, they met a mouse: Joan. Joan once told me that she used to drive around London on a Lambretta in the sixties. The transition from scooter to car was evidently difficult, as she cannot or will not reverse unless there is an acre of space around her. There wasn’t on this occasion, so she made helpless and pathetic gestures to the rats to make them reverse instead. This they eventually did, very slowly, with twin expressions of utter resignation. Joan waited until they had come to a complete stop before cautiously advancing.

And as she moved forward, I saw the workmen’s lorry, loaded with traffic lights, go past the end of my street. A small but patient queue of cars was following it. I just hope the rats weren’t hoping to go to Newport that day, because by the time they had got back onto the main road, they would have found themselves in a slow convoy three cars back from where they had started before attempting their great escape down my street.