Does anyone reading this happen to live in Spanker Lane, Nether Heage, Derbyshire? How about Friar's Entry, Oxford, then? Or Butt Hole Road, Conisbrough? Oh, surely there must be a somebody who can help in the whole of Shitterton, Dorset?

You see I'd like you to tell me this. Has living in a place with an “amusing” name affected your quality of life? Are you constantly late for work because whenever you leave the house you collapse in tears of mirth as you glimpse the sign reading “Fanny Passage”? Is it impossible to order anything over the phone because the person on the other end falls off their chair when you say your address is Crotch Crescent (it's in Oxfordshire if you want to zip over there with your Polaroid).

I'm guessing that your answer would be something like this: yes, it is often difficult to convince a taxi driver to come out to Grope Lane, and pizza delivery places will occasionally slam down the phone when you say you live in Titty Ho. But actually you've got bigger things to worry about at the moment, such as keeping a roof over your head and not joining the P45 brigade.

So you might wonder then why Lewes District Council in Sussex has been busying itself drawing up a new policy that will ban all street names that lend themselves to a double entendre.

Under these guidelines, which would involve buying new software for street-naming, addresses in Lewes such as Juggs Lane or Cockshut Road would never have existed. They would have been deemed risqué and probably replaced with something bland and Milton Keynes-ish, such as “New Road”. The proposal, accused of being a waste of taxpayers' money, states that any street name that could give offence or encourage the defacing of road names will no longer be allowed. It adds: “Avoid...names capable of deliberate misinterpretation such as Hoare Road, Typple Avenue, Quare Street, Corfe Close (4 Corfe Close) etc”.

Hold on a minute - “4 Corfe Close”? I had to read that three times before I realised what I was supposed to be offended by. I don't know if they're all dirty-minded down at Lewes Council but I doubt that I'd have seen anything to snort at there if they hadn't pointed it out.

I'm sure that it's tiresome for municipal cleaners when graffiti vandals do their stuff on the signs for, say, Three Cocks (Powys) or Minge Lane (Worcestershire). But Lewes is overreacting.

I live down the road from Menlove Avenue, Liverpool, which turns out to be the No 34 entry in Rude Britain's Top100 of naughty place names. Neither I nor anyone I know has ever read anything smutty into Menlove. You'd have to be kind of sad for it even to occur. I think Lewes councillors will find that the only people getting excited over such matters are them.

But maybe they've got too much time and money on their hands. In the current climate when people in the private sector are sharing paperclips and arriving for work each day not knowing whether there'll be a bin liner on their desk, others in the public sector - well, aren't.

Rare is the organisation that can spare resources to indulge in daft schemes these days. But it seems that local authorities still can. Which is why police in Devon have been doling out free flip-flops to help drunken women walk home, why drinkers in Bolton have been handed free bubble blowers to stop them getting into fights, why Brent Council is dishing out tea and biscuits to late-night revellers as part of a £30,000 package of measures to curb antisocial behaviour. Lancashire County

Council meanwhile, recruits an “anti-recession guru” who will be paid up to £93,000 with a £5,000 car allowance.

I have never gone in for the knee-jerk slagging-off of “loony” council schemes which are often well meant and grossly misrepresented. But in these skint times such enterprises do highlight the different pressures on private and public sectors.

Recently JCB workers agreed to accept a £50 a week pay cut in a desperate effort to save their jobs. Since then dozens of businesses have gone to the wall and thousands of employees been sent packing to the nearest Jobcentre.

Yet it emerged this week that one group of civil servants are being sent to a luxury hotel at a cost of £1,800 a head on junkets to learn about “diversity” in Britain. I am not saying that such courses aren't necessary: I'm sure the “experiential, participant-based” sessions involving interactive role play with actors are helpful for ways of “inspiring culture change”. What I'm saying is that recessions hit some harder than others.

Lewes Council might think that it is acting for the public good by coming over all Victorian Dad, but it isn't. Sniggering at double entendres is a loved and time-

honoured tradition in this country and, God knows, we need all the laughs we can get right now. You can cheer up any fed-up friend by simply buying them a road map of Germany. Looking up places such as Rimsting in Bavaria and of course everyone's favourite, Wank, a mountain in the Bavarian Alps, is deeply puerile but provides hours of fun and is more entertaining than a game of Monopoly.

Half the reason for travelling to the Orkney Islands is to get your photo taken next to the road sign for Twatt. And what kind of person would you have to be anyway to get offended by a sign reading Hoare Road? It's not even spelt right.

Ironically, what does cause frequent offence is when local authorities squander thousands of pounds on “rebranding” towns, usually giving them a stupid motto to boot, when they were perfectly all right as they were. Last April Oldham Council spent £100,000 of public money rebranding their town - and came up with a logo comprising a big circle over the word Oldham. Don't know about you but I'd rather see the money spent on more binmen.

Councils need to lighten up and stop trying to erode the quirky richness of Britain's heritage. And if they want to discuss this further I vote that we all meet up in Bell End, Worcestershire.

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