In our local playground the walls are painted with children’s murals depicting the crazed faces of Mickey, Donald, Pluto and chums, daubed in masonry-paint primaries. They are, at best, trying to brighten the place up, in a coloured-in tracings of the original cartoon sketches sort of way. At worst, they make me think of terminally ill children on underfunded hospital wards and a rather cynical friend and former flatmate who used to work for the Scottish Arts Council. When asked what she had done in the office that day, she would usually reply, before making an icepick-in-the-forehead gesture: “Signed off funding for another p***ing kids’ mural.”

Of course, Disney favourites on playground walls are as unextraordinary as ketchup on children’s faces, but then last weekend, while satisfying my daughter’s slide obsession, I noticed a graffiti removal man-with-a-van trying to achieve the near impossible: rub out the interesting, if unexceptional, Banksy-lite graffiti that had been superimposed on our weather-pocked cuddly friends, while keeping the real “art” intact (in this case, a 4ft Irn-Bru-orange Tigger, probably circa 1987). He (the man with the chemicals, not the Tigger) was applying the sort of concentration one might expect of the Courtauld Institute’s chief restorer on the last day of a 14-year project to restore a priceless Giotto crucifix from the Santa Maria Novella in Florence. He was holed up in Holloway with his spray-gun for most of the day.

When I scribbled down the number on the van and called up the company to find out what the rate for a private removal job was I was quoted £400: £400 to take the mural back to its former grotty perfection. For that, surely a selection of the older children who currently monopolise the pirate ship could do a better job.

On one remover’s website, Graffiti Removal Ltd, there is a glorious boast: “A litter bin returned to its former glory!” The before picture shows said bin with some rather jolly scrawls on it. The after shot shows just a boring old bin. I’m not condoning vandalism, but aesthetically-speaking I know which one I prefer.

I must admit that I haven’t quite got the great Holloway Walls-of-Art competition off the ground yet the suggestion of erasing Piglet produced a similar explosion in our bureaucrat friends as the Chapman Brothers

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