AT THE end of last week, as Lily the Lurcher and I walked down to Syde Village, we both knew that at last spring was on the way.

We couldn¹t see it because the fields were still covered in snow but we could smell it in the air and hear it in the song of birds which were no longer too busy keeping warm and finding food but were sitting on the still bare branches singing their hearts out.

Down beyond the village, however, things were not so jolly. Two days earlier the driver of an articulated lorry loaded with cow hides bound for the skin salting enterprise at Harcombe had ignored advice to look at a map before leaving the main road and had relied on his satellite navigation.

That disembodied lady with the bossy voice, instead of guiding him half a mile down a straight road to his destination (which he could have seen if he¹d looked at the map) took him down one steep hill and up another much narrower one where he got stuck on a hairpin bend, tried to reverse and ended up in a field while still managing to block the road completely.

Attempts to pull out the loaded lorry failed miserably and the Poles who work for the skin company were sent to unload the cow hides one by one.

There was much coming and going of vehicles with heavy lifting gear but still the road remained very closed.

Finally, on Sunday night we returned home to find the stricken lorry, two JCBs, a breakdown lorry for the lorry and several other vehicles all moving very slowly towards the main road.

Feelings seem to have run rather high in some quarters, although I can¹t quite understand why as nobody was desperately inconvenienced as long as they knew they had to take a different route. In Syde it was wonderful because no one but residents and rescuers came down the road for five whole days.