The other month, I was travelling back from Northwood down Sandy Lane when I was surprised to see a little bit of a hold-up just beyond the turning into Moor Park. I sat there unknowing, inching forward, expecting to see a road works or similar cause along Hampermill Lane.

I was keen to progress along the road because it was just after 4.30 in the afternoon and I had no wish to become involved in the bottleneck at Bushey Arches during the rush-hour, as I had to get to my daughter’s house in Bushey.

We had just returned from our USA holiday and had not caught up with the back copies of the Watford Observer, which had been saved for me. In fact they were lying beside me and I might have found one or two of them particularly pertinent to my predicament. It was the time of that traffic-jam-provoking one-way experiment over in the area of Vicarage Road; the knock-on effects of which were to blight the lives of sundry Watfordians and visitors for a month or so. The boffins at County Hall come up with these ill-thought-out suggestions, try them out and then realise they are wrong, while the ordinary inhabitants pick up the excessive bill of inconvenience.

I recall some 14 years back, possibly the same boffin came up with an idea for traffic calmers in Sarratt. Dependent on which direction you were going, they built some islands along Dimmocks Lane, alternating them from one side of the road to the other, forcing traffic to slow down if something was coming the other way because these eight-foot, yard-wide islands, with posts imbedded in them, acted as a chicane. It is a busy road during rush hour as it is a village rat-run.

You can picture the man from Herts CC, popping along to Sarratt on a cloudy afternoon, taking in the rural ambience and then coming up with this plan. He may well have come up with the same plan on a sunny afternoon. However, what looks good on paper, is not always best, for on a sunny morning the sun shines right across the hills to Dimmocks Lane and up past Biggerstaff’s garage.

So you drive down there as normal and the sun is shining right in your face and you drop the windscreen blinds and negotiate the old familiar road, slowing down at the right-angled bend. The result was a succession of accidents when cars found themselves mounting the first island and coming to a halt at the unforgiving posts. One car was actually turned upside down.

Readers complained and asked for their removal and a local county councillor said this was a “knee-jerk reaction”. So I was amused when a Sarratt resident wrote in and suggest the councillor should volunteer to be chained to the first island on a very sunny morning, and we could all watch how many times his knee jerked during rush hour. The result was the first and most troublesome island was removed within weeks.

A decade later, you travel up Dimmocks Lane and there is not one of those six islands left. They have all been removed and only the scars on the tarmac give testimony to their seemingly pointless and expensive existence. Doubtless the man who came up with the hair-brained idea has moved on. Possibly he was the one behind the ludicrous innovation in Watford in October.

After spending some ten minutes in Hampermill Lane and not progressing very far, I, along with a few others, undertook a U-turn. I headed back up Sandy Lane and then turned into Hayling Road, then Prestwick Road, Little Oxhey Lane, Oxhey Lane, Old Redding and finished up at The Alpine, Bushey Heath.

Coming down to Bushey High Street, I signalled right but there was a great line of traffic, I suspect stretching down to Bushey Arches, for the Herts CC “experiment” had wide-reaching effects. A driver in front of me was seeking to turn right and a Transit driver was blocking his route. He had little option, because it was all nose to tail, but an exchange of pleasantries ensued with the result the Transit driver took his eyes off the ball and bumped into the car in front of him.

With lines of traffic going both ways, Bushey High Street is not the best place to get out of vehicles and exchange insurance details.

Eventually I got through, wondering if the person who came up with the experiment that caused the motorised mayhem, was back home, traffic-jam free, acknowledging to his wife that: “Yes, I did have a good day in the office as it happens.”