My attendance at the hilarious Big Ballet in High Wycombe on Tuesday — or at any rate my snatching of a brief pub meal ahead of it — was all but compromised by an almighty traffic snarl-up that appeared to have engulfed the whole town.

The jam up the hill from the Wycombe Swan stretched almost back to the M40. It took us 40 minutes to descend to the car park.

What could have been the reason? An accident? Road works?

On reaching the theatre box office I had my answer.

The cause was that pernicious breed, the road traffic engineers.

“They put a new set of traffic lights in by the railway station this week,” I was told. “It’s been murder ever since.”

Anyone who knows this part of Wycombe will realise that it has always been pretty murderous there, with a succession of mini-roundabouts from which egress is frequently blocked.

It would take the collective idiocy of a group of traffic engineers — with their insane but endemic love of traffic lights — to make a bad situation significantly worse.

Welcome, good folk of Wycombe, to your very own version of Oxford’s Frideswide Square . . .