We are on our way to school and performing a weird little dance that is a cross between hopscotch, Twister and the Adventure Game that used to come on the telly with a grumbling alien plant called Uncle.

The reason for this strange ballet is that the pavement is peppered with dog muck. Because children have built-in homing devices that draw their feet unerringly to any mound of faeces on the ground, you can hear shrieks of “poo!” from parents and see children suddenly dragged away from their trajectories to avoid piles of droppings.

There has even been dog muck inside the school grounds, on the path that leads from the main road to the playground. One morning, a gang of children were gathered to one side, watching reverently like something out of Lord Of The Flies as parents ushered their children towards the school, spotted the poo, and began screeching at their progeny to not tread in it.

It’s bad enough when people let their dogs go in the street, but to let them into the grounds of a primary school to do their dirt... well. It’s enough to make you get a petition up.

There’s a track nearby where we sometimes go for a walk. Unfortunately, so do a lot of dog owners. That can also be like running a very smelly gauntlet, and lucky indeed is the family who goes for a Sunday afternoon stroll and doesn’t come back looking and smelling like they’ve been living in a kennel.

It wouldn’t be so bad if dog poo today was like it used to be when I was a kid – all white and hard. You don’t see much of that any more, and I was reliably informed (by someone in a pub, I think) that this is because dogs don’t eat calcium-rich bones much these days.

I can sort of understand that people who own dogs might not necessarily want to be squatting down behind their pets every time they’ve done their business, scooping up the undesirables into a plastic bag.

Unfortunately for them, that’s the law. Dog poo really has nothing going for it – well, unless you’re a fly, I suppose, in which case it’s a massive buffet and holiday island all in one. For the rest of us, dog poo smells, looks horrible, and is full of nasty bugs that make children go blind.

I do apologise. It isn’t, I quite agree, a suitable topic for polite conversation. But desperation with the daily foxtrot along poo-piled paths has driven me to this.

So, please stop letting your animals foul pavements and, especially, school grounds, or at least have the decency to clean up after them. A lot of people blame the problem of dog poo directly on the owners.

But I say that’s nonsense. It’s definitely the dogs.