It was positively spring-like last Saturday as we set off in our car to visit The Harlequin shopping centre.

One of our favourite routes into central Watford takes us down a winding country lane, lined with holly hedges, the occasional oak tree and fields where shaggy Shetland ponies straight out of a Thelwell cartoon lift their sturdy little heads to stare at the car as we pass them, outraged at this intrusion into their peaceful afternoon.

It's said that you can tell the approximate age of a hedgerow by counting the number of species that grow within it in the space of 100 metres.

The more varieties of tree, bush and plant you can find, the older the hedge, and therefore the lane whose boundaries it marks is likely to be.

If that's the case, then the narrow winding lane in question here must be centuries old.

We liked to think that this quiet, rather beautiful slice of rural England on the edge of Watford was relatively undiscovered by all but a handful of joggers, cyclists and motorists with small vehicles, but last Saturday we realised that this was far from the case.

We hadn't gone more than 300 metres before we came upon a giant pile of debris, dumped quite deliberately at the side of the hedge and spilling out into the lane itself.

Visible among the builders' rubble - because that's most clearly what it was - was an old plastic bath, a cracked pink vanity basin, clumps of tiles and plaster and twisted plastic piping.

The mound of rubbish, heaped just behind a bend, forced us to swerve immediately onto the other side of the lane and could have caused an accident if someone had been coming in the opposite direction.

Worse still, the rubble continued to be strewn up the lane for another 100 metres or so, where it ended abruptly with a particularly nasty brown kitchen unit circa 1978.

Not surprisingly, we soon found the rest of the kitchen as we continued gingerly along the lane.

Two minutes later we came upon the sink, taps and some cupboards casually dumped in the road, and then, something of a piece de resistance this I feel, a smashed and dented washing machine and antiquated stove that was propped up against a grassy bank.

Smaller items, mostly rubble and, rather unpleasantly, soiled nappies continued to litter the lane for almost its entire length.

You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that someone doing a bit of home improvement work had loaded the tired, broken contents of their house into the back of a big van and opened the back doors at an opportune moment.

Quite apart from the fact that this selfish, ignorant pig of a person had absolutely no thought for the safety of others, or for the effect that their fly-tipping would have on the environment, I find it hard to believe that anyone would go to so much effort - loading up the van, driving to a quiet spot and then unloading all these heavy items - when they could just as easily have taken the rubble to their local dump.

Even more galling was the thought that someone had actually deliberately staked out this lane as a suitably remote spot to spew out their detritus.

It made me wonder just what kind of Neanderthal would be so completely impervious to the lovely landscape around them that they could dump their old kitchen and bathroom in the middle of it without a pang of conscience.

Then we arrived in Watford and saw, again, what vandals have done to the exterior of the Peace Children's Centre and remembered that these days we live in a very strange world indeed.

I must admit to a wry smile a couple of weeks ago when a correspondent to the WO raised the issue of the Peace Children's Centre and almost implied that the currently visible damage was some kind of expression of architectural sensibility.

Well, it's certainly not my favourite building in Watford either, but it was presumably designed to maximise space on the site and engage and interest its young clients.

The kind of person who throws stones at a centre for sick children is not a style terrorist, but someone urgently in need of treatment' themself - preferably at an establishment provided by Her Majesty.

And I'd like that fly-tipper to join them there.

Jane Gregory's letter to the WO last week about the tawdry state of Watford hit the nail on the head. "How can we put the pride back into Watford?" she wrote. But her question goes wider than that.