Communication is so important, yet every day we are bombarded with wrong or out of date information. I suspect we have all slowed down when driving to read a sign placed there for our attention by Bucks County Council – those yellow ones?

First of all, they are invariably placed somewhere where it is impossible to read the important bit while travelling at a normal speed, so if the road is one frequently travelled the information can be gathered piecemeal. First pass – ‘Oh they’re closing the road’; second pass ‘From December 11th’; third pass ‘January 6th’.

All the information you don’t need is big and bold. Then they stick on the crucial stuff that affects you in such small lettering that it can only be read in one go if you slow down to a crawl and irritate the man with the load horn behind you. But this isn’t the end of your woes, oh long suffering council tax payer and driver.

The sign will still be there for weeks and months after the work has been completed, so that more and more drivers have to slow down unnecessarily to read something that turns out be as relevant to them as the thoughts of Donald Trump. Although in an increasingly insane world perhaps we should pay more attention to those thoughts and his bizarre utterances – heaven forfend!

There is a sign languishing in the bushes near where I live, with all its support framework, notifying us of a road closure that in fact never did happen.

Perhaps they are leaving it there for next year – just one number to change then!

This casual disregard for pointless signage is of course not confined to County councils.

Look at any noticeboard outside a school or village hall and often last year’s jumble sale poster is damply loitering behind the condensation.

It seemed a good idea for organisations to have websites too, until the need to constantly update them rendered a vast proportion of them pointless or irritating. My doctor’s website warns me that August may be a tricky month for appointments and I suspect they are not predicting that for 2016.

Mind you they also recently sent me a letter suggesting that the winter is a bad time “for influenza, or ‘flu’ as it sometimes called”. Really? Oh that’s what flu is!

How kind of you ‘to translate’ or ‘patronise’ as it is sometimes called.