The machine needs to be fed. When you have 650 members of parliament elected to make laws, and an army of 500,000 civil servants whose job is to make sure that those laws work, and more legions in Brussels making more laws, there is never going to be any respite. The machine can never rest until absolutely everything is illegal.

Whenever I let my mind wander, I become quivery-lipped and frightened thinking about all the things I could do 10 years ago that I cannot do now. I may not smack my children, for instance, or talk on a mobile telephone while driving or put too much salt on my mashed potato or smoke at home if my cleaning lady objects or give my donkey a tender burial or encourage my dogs to kill rats. And if I put the wrong thing in the wrong-coloured dustbin, I’m likely to spend the next five years digging tunnels.

Outside my little world, things are even worse. Schools must ensure that their urinals are a certain height off the ground. Trawlermen must throw everything they catch back into the sea. The makers of beer must tell their customers to drink responsibly. And if Rowan Atkinson were to make a joke about gypsies, he would be digging tunnels too.

Today the machine is running out of people wearing high-visibility jackets to enforce its avalanche of new laws and so it is dispensing with the courts system and locking up people who may be innocent. And still it whirrs, announcing last week that it is going to ban people from becoming sexually aroused.

At the moment lap-dancing clubs are classified in the same category as coffee shops and karaoke bars. Quite why coffee shops or karaoke bars need to be “classified” by a government agent in a high-visibility jacket we are not told.

Nor is there much evidence that this classification system is working because, so far as I can tell, every single town in Britain these days is equally terrible - a vomit-stained centre full of estate agents, charity shops and building societies, ringed with a prefabricated, fluorescent sprawl of people in purple shirts trying to sell you Pentium processors and button-backed leatherette sofas.

At least a lap-dancing club brings a bit of individuality to a town, a bit of a respite from the endless chain stores and horrible pound shops. Sadly, though, the machine disagrees. It says that such places provide “visual sexual stimulation” and as a result councils must be allowed to prevent new ones from opening and perhaps must even close existing venues.

Does this mean that anything that provides “visual sexual stimulation” must be erased from the landscape? That would be a worry for Dorothy Perkins, as I know one chap who claims that its mannequins are extremely stimulating. And let’s not forget, shall we, that some people are aroused by goats. I’ve even seen one photograph of a man making love to his Range Rover.

I struggle to see what’s wrong with lap-dancing bars. I would object, for sure, if anyone suggested building an airport for Somalian rapists in my backyard, but a gentlemen’s club? No.

I don’t like them much. I don’t like the music or the volume it’s played at. I don’t like the businessmen who go there and I don’t like sitting on velour. But, unlike the vast majority of the objectors, I base my opinions on experience. Extensive experience, in fact.

What do the do-gooders think goes on in these places? Do they imagine it’s a sea of opium, with men in macs playing pass-the-parcel with their embarrassing itches? Because it just isn’t.

Usually there is a handful of girls - all called Becki and all with unwise artwork on their shoulders and bones in their noses - sitting around wearing bits of chiffon and £1.99 underwear that was billed in the catalogue as “erotic” but is no such thing.

After a little while, a Becki will come over and tell you, usually in a Birmingham accent, that she likes to do lesbionics with her friends when the bar closes, in the hope that you will be so aroused that you’ll give her 20 quid for a dance.

It’s not a dance that your grandparents would recognise. In fact, you don’t dance at all. You just sit there, with your hands over your ears to drown out the music, while the girl takes off her mum’s net curtain and puts two bagfuls of silicone near your face.

This is like waving a steak in front of a hungry man. But the juices don’t flow because you know that if you even look as though you’re going to touch them, a bull elephant in a dinner jacket will arrive on the scene and break your liver.

Some clubs do allow the dancers to sit on the customers’ knees but these are to be avoided, partly because some of the younger customers are so full of testosterone that physical contact of any kind might cause them to burst. And partly because the Beckis who work in such places tend to be quite big. Get one of those on your lap and, if you’re not careful, you’re going to go home with gangrene.

I’m not stupid. I’m not going to say lap dancers aren’t sexually stimulating. In fact there’s one called Jennifer at a place in Dearborn, Michigan, whom I would describe as very sexually stimulating. But then so is the Polish girl who works at my local Caffè Nero. And so, I’m told, is Richard Hammond. Does that mean we should pixelate his little face on Top Gear tonight?

This new scheme is proof that the machine has gone off its rocker. And you know what scares me most of all? It’s like the internet. We can never turn it off.

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