YOU need a licence to drive a car and you need a licence to watch TV but now I propose it’s time that you need a licence to walk along the pavement in town centres.

I don’t mind if this is administered nationally or town centre by town centre, but enough is enough.

I’ve lost too many minutes of my life (and by the way, I was born 15,016 days ago. That’s 2,145 weeks) walking behind people who can’t walk in a straight line and have no spatial awareness.

Yes sir, you, the short bloke with greying hair who weaved along the pavement on Tuesday, moving left and right as I tried to rush past you.

Couldn’t you feel my presence? (Cue old Darth Vader joke – “Luke, I know what you’re getting for Christmas? “How?” “I’ve felt your presents.”) I was virtually breathing down your neck. I jinked one way and then dummied as if to go the other but you just sidestepped into my path time and time again.

I didn’t feel I knew you well enough to simply push you into a shop doorway and run past so I politely waited until you went away.

Then you sauntered across the road and my life was my own again.

If you’d been licensed by the Walking Authority it would surely have been spotted on CCTV and your licence withdrawn Then you’d no longer be able to swan along gawping in shop windows and making busy people’s life a misery.

See, when I want to go out for a nice walk I might choose a lovely spot in the New Forest and wander through the bluebells listening to warblers singing in the trees and watch squirrels scamper up mighty oaks.

I wouldn’t pick a busy town centre full of working people trying to make the most of their brief lunchtime away from the computer.

So you three girls, all of you wearing flourescent purple jackets, talking into your mobile phones while still talking to each other, you’re now banned from the town centre.

Your licence to walk has been revoked.

There’ll be an area near the balloon in the Lower Gardens where people who want to dawdle and chat can go. It’ll be furnished with scatter cushions and Heat magazines. And you’ll have to be inside it by 1pm, because I’ve arranged for it to be locked for the whole hour between 1pm and 2pm, to allow me free access to the shops to buy all the little things during the course of the morning my wife has called to get me to purchase.

This new rule starts from the moment you finish this column so don’t say you haven’t been warned.