When it comes to brain power, vandals fall just behind "supermodel" and "stegosaurus" on the official grey matter spectrometer.

Supermodels are, of course, not usually over-burdened when it comes to the old noggin filler. They can walk, although not necessarily in a straight line, and they can talk, although not necessarily in complete sentences, but challenge them to do both at the same time and you are simply asking for trouble.

Compared to a stegosaurus, however, they are nothing less than Einstein's prettier sisters. Ask one of these prehistoric beasties - they're the ones with the fetching row of ping-pong bats stapled to their backs - to model a Dolce & Gabbana floral sarong while talking about their favourite hair-slides and the poor thing is likely to spontaneously combust through grey matter over-load.

I am told by an eminent palaeontologist - all right, it's my five-year-old son, but he's read every dinosaur book ever written and has a particular penchant for wearing brown corduroy slacks - that if you sliced open the head of a stegosaurus, a gigantic creature that weighed two tonnes and was about the same size as a couple of double-decker buses, you would find a brain approximately the size of a walnut.

But even this prehistoric numskull would have had more chance of passing a GCSE in drawin' and colourin' than some of the vandals that lurk about vacantly in my neighbour-hood.

My fellow Huntington dwellers and I were the lucky people who witnessed at first hand the "pig's head on a telegraph pole" incident recently, but I was happy to put that down to a youthful interest in Damien Hirst-style modern art coupled with a healthy head for heights.

What really gets my goat, as opposed to my pig which is, quite frankly, way beyond the reach of anyone without a strong stomach and their own stilts, is the way some complete and utter morons treat the children's play area at our community centre.

The facilities are not exactly York's answer to Alton Towers, but the swings, climbing frame, slide, seesaw and wooden assault course give your average kid plenty to go at on a sunny Sunday afternoon while your average parent slouches on a bench catching up on a few winks behind an upside-down weekend supplement.

Unfortunately, however, some local residents of the spotty, greasy-haired, knuckle-dragging variety appear to have decided that the play area is a bit too tame.

Their campaign to spice things up began with a campaign of pornographic graffiti that would make Sunday Sport readers blush.

While I'm sure Stacey's parents are very proud of her "shagging" capabilities - apparently she's done half of Huntington and is now branching out into New Earswick - and Andi's mum never stops talking about her lad's nine-inch tongue and his talent for breathing through his ears, I could have happily lived for the rest of my life without reading about them.

The graffiti, however, was nothing, a mere ink spot in the ocean, when compared to the latest wheeze from these fine upstanding members of the community.

On their last visit to the play area, my one-year-old couldn't walk around in her usual wobbly, Bambi-esque way and my son had to put up with me screeching "be careful" at 11-second intervals because our beloved band of local vandals had stuck broken glass around the swings, at the bottom of the slide and at other cunning points where a bare knee, foot or hand might just make contact.

The only explanation I can come up with, with a little help from Yorkshire's new MEP (and honorary walnut-brained dinosaur) Godfrey Bloom, for their reprehensible behaviour and their total lack of anything even vaguely resembling grey matter is that their mothers obviously did not spend enough time cleaning behind the fridge when they were children.

Updated: 09:22 Monday, July 26, 2004