ONLY the heartless would have driven by. He looked so pathetic, lying at the road side, his left leg bent beneath his mud-splattered, naked body, his head twisted at an uncomfortable angle.

Yet had I not been in nostalgic mood, induced by BBC television’s Lark Rise to Candleford, I wouldn’t have been driving slowly from Fringford along that winding road to Hethe on Tuesday morning.

Parking up, I walked back to where he lay, a couple of hundred yards from Hethe Brede Farm – a sad, dirty, one-eyed teddy bear.

But this was no cheap 21st century teddy, all fluffy with inappropriate-coloured imitation fur. This chap was brown, solidly made, but with large bare patches revealing the original sawdust-stuffed canvass. He probably first entered nursery service some years before the Second World War, as did my old bear, Fred, now living in genteel retirement in Malvern.

I straightened his limbs and tried to clean him, removing mud from his one eye. How had he come to this? My mind raced. Surely he hadn’t been abandoned. Had he fallen from a pram or pushchair? Had a child accidentally tossed him through an open car window?

My first inclination was to take him home, but what if the owner came looking, anxiety etched on his or her young face? What if someone was already re-tracing their steps? What if it was a lonely child’s only chum?

In the end I sat him on the parapet of the bridge near the farm, where he could clearly be seen.

What is it about teddy bears that turn grown men into soppy wrecks?

* UNLESS my memory is playing tricks, I reckon it is 20 years this month since the M40 opened to traffic between Oxford and the north.

The tragic three-vehicle accident on the southbound carriageway, between Ardley and the A34 near Bicester, gave a sharp reminder of what rush hour had been like for those of us travelling from the Banbury area down the ‘old main road’ in pre-M40 days.

On Monday it took three and a half hours to reach Headington from my village near Banbury – 80 minutes of this spent struggling through a near-gridlocked town.

Lorries of every size and description, coaches, and even the Army, formed one continuous queue through Adderbury, Deddington, Hopcroft’s Holt and on to Kidlington.

Traffic lights were an added nuisance and the powers-that-be had also chosen that morning to clear gulleys, meaning workmen added to the frustration.

Problems on the M40 are not new, but the incident showed how fragile the road system really is, and how much we miss the motorway when it is out of use.