Our streets are suffering from a monstrous plague of blotches

„Imagine if you were Leonardo da Vinci and you had just immortalised the complexion of the Mona Lisa, and then you came back to find some vandal had used a magic marker to blob black stubble on her lovely cheeks and chin. Or put yourself in the shoes of the head groundsman at Wimbledon, and imagine that you had spent a whole year mowing and watering to produce the perfect lawn and then – on the eve of the men's final – 200 moles had simultaneously erupted through the grass of Centre Court.

Or think what it is like to be a parent who rashly allows a teenage party to take place in your home, only to find a series of red wine stains and cigarette burns distributed in every square foot of your expensive, oatmeal-coloured, wall-to-wall carpet. How would you feel? You would be fit to be tied. You would want to find each and every culprit and hit them with the penal code of medieval England or modern Tehran – whichever is the more barbaric.

Such are the feelings of many good citizens when they see the effect of chewing gum on our streets and pavements. It is a plague. It is a monstrous acne of sticky grey blotches. It is an awful self-inflicted impetigo on the face of modern London, and it costs a fortune to treat. The manufacturers spend only a couple of pennies to produce every stick or chiclet of gum, yet once they are gobbed on to the pavement and trodden flat by human traffic they adhere with such barnacle-like ferocity that they cost up to £1 each to remove.”