​It’s a tough job cleaning after your dog but someone’s got to do it - Vladimir McTavish

I know who is responsible.He lives right next to the bus stop four doors away. Obviously he didn’t do it. His dog did, but he did nothing to stop it. If I were to catch the bloke in the act, I could report him to the council. As it is, I am left to fantasise about taking revenge.

I could take the nuclear response, in the way that an enraged French farmer might do. Every so often, a bunch of smallholders in Brittany take out their rage at EU agricultural policy by driving their tractors down the Camps Elysees and leaving piles of manure at the foot of the Arc de Triomphe.

Similar things have happened here. Many years ago, when I was a student in Newcastle, I remember some farmer from Northumberland driving his muck-spreader into the city centre and spraying the outside of Barclay’s Bank in retaliation for their turning down his request for a loan.

Sadly I don’t have that option as the guy shares a front door with his neighbour’s flat.

Conversely, a few years ago, we had a toalie on the pavement for the whole of January that was almost a work of beauty. It was perfectly-shaped, conical and tapering to a point, a perfect real-life representation of the emoji of a poo, like a miniature tribute to the roof of the Saint James Quarter.

During the entire month, it never lost its shape or structural integrity. It was like a piece of conceptual art, and it became quite the talk of the neighbourhood. I constantly found myself striking up conversations with complete strangers or talking to local people with whom I had previously only been on nodding terms.

“My goodness, is that jobby still there?”, one neighbour would ask. “Yes”, another would reply, “Heaven knows what they’ve been feeding that dog”.

If someone had told me that the City Council had commissioned it as a focal point to bring the local community together, I would have believed them.

Sorry, I must go. I’ve just seen a huge dog squatting outside the front door.