MIXED messages from a powerful Government agency are no good for anybody, especially those whose lives are likely to be irreversibly affected yet again by revived plans for an A1 motorway between Dishforth and Barton.

We are all supposed to be driving on the same side of the road in this congested country, yet it appeared this week that the left and right hands at the Highways Agency didn't know what the other was doing.

One of our reporters attended a meeting on Monday of the North Yorkshire County Council committee for Hambleton, where an A1 route manager outlined a likely timescale for the resurrected project.

Rightly or wrongly, the poor man was taken to task by Coun John Weighell for the time and money squandered over the past ten years on a project which should have been up and running by now.

He highlighted, quite correctly, the paradox of the properties bought up by the agency to accommodate the widening but then disposed of on the open market after the original motorway plans were shelved in 1996.

It may all have boiled down to a matter of semantics involving financial years, but the agency presentation left the indelible impression that the revived scheme had slipped by about a year.

Hold on, though. Less than 24 hours later the agency itself issued a statement which, in announcing the award of a £330m contract, highlighted a niggling discrepancy by confirming that the project was still on course to meet the timetable announced almost two years ago.

Considerable effort was expended by our reporter in trying to establish the facts through a helpful agency spokeswoman who suggested that there had been a breakdown in communications, presumably somewhere between Dishforth and Barton.

That may be so, but it's just not good enough when so many people expect rather more precision concerning consultations which could affect their lives in fundamental ways.

Musical youth

SAGE is going to mean much more to the North-East than a herb, or even accounting software, though that firm's support has given its name to the music centre taking shape on the south bank of the Tyne to house the Northern Sinfonia and Folkworks, to name but two.

Taking shape is probably the right term for the centre, due to open next winter, as Norman Foster's building has been variously described as a breaking wave or a human posterior, but a taste of what is already taking shape musically was given at the Bowes Museum on Saturday evening.

Young Sinfonia, a chamber group of scarily youthful string players gave subtle support to Rodney Hall's mandolin in the first part of a concert of baroque music. In the second, joined by an equally young oboeist and under their conductor, from the harpsichord and from the Northern Sinfonia, Alan Fearon, they gave pleasure and commanded admiration in equal measure.

Sage is a broad church of classical, pop and vernacular (folk to you and Spectator) music; performance, education and community programmes. Let the people sing ...and play ... and those of us who can't do either can listen.