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A new type of disfigurement has come to Britain's towns and villages. It's worse than illegal fly tipping, and worse than those Styrofoam takeaway containers that carpet every provincial city centre at three in the morning. It's even worse than stone cladding. And it's all the fault of your local authority.

Many years ago I remember taking a mock advanced driving test, during which the examiner asked, out of the blue, if I could describe the last road sign I'd passed. It was easy then . . . but not any more, because now you go past a road sign every 1.3 seconds.

I first noticed it last week, coming into London on the A3, and now it's driving me to distraction. Every lamppost, every telegraph pole and every branch in every tree is festooned with instructions about what the motorist may or may not do at that particular moment.

You're on a red route so you have a sign, then another, and then another explaining exactly what that means. But you know what it means, and you know you're on a red route because there, at the side of the road, painted clearly on the orange of the bus lane, or the green of the cycle path, are two red lines.

If there's a bus lane, then there will be signs telling you what that means too. And then things really start to get stupid. You're told that the central London congestion charging zone is five miles away. Why? Lots of things are five miles away. You're also told that there's a speed camera ahead, that there are buslane cameras, that you're near a library, that there's no left turn into Acacia Grove . . . and what's this? Oh, that you 're entering a "drinking controlled zone".

It's got to the point now where there are so many signs that they blur into a background hiss of white noise. It's a bit like the warnings you get before a film on television. In the olden days, when the announcer said in a solemn BBCish tone that the film about to start contained violence, you knew you were in for a 90minute bloodbath with many severed heads. And so you sat a little more upright in your Parker Knoll Recliner.

But now, when they say the film contains mild violence and strong nipples, you just go into a trance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you're surprised and horrified when the movie starts with a shot of Al Pacino having his arms sawn off.

This is what's happening on the roads. They can put up a sign saying there are speed bumps ahead, and even if it isn't blocked by another sign saying the road to the left has children running around on it, it really doesn't register. So you hit the sleeping policeman doing about 80mph. And your back snaps.

The reason, of course, for all the signs is . . . lawyers. After your back has been broken the council can send its legal team round to the quadriplegic department of the local hospital to explain to your relatives that, unfortunately, no claim for damages can be made because there was a sign warning motorists that there were humps ahead.

That's why you get those idiotic messages on the motorway matrix boards these days; if they tell you it's windy, you can't sue anyone for being blown into a bridge parapet. And you won't be able to argue, of course, partly because they're right and partly because you'll have lots of tubes coming out of your nose.

The upshot is that every single street is now a Technicolor blaze of legal disclaimers and nonsense. Not only is this ugly, but it's dangerous too, because not that long ago, when you ran off the road, the chances of hitting a sign were slim. Now, though, you're almost certain to hit something thanking you for driving carefully through the village.

Sadly, I can only imagine that things will get worse, because soon the sign advising you that you're entering a nuclearfree zone will have to be translated into 14 languages, and there will have to be some sort of mushroomcloud pictogram as well, for the educationally challenged.

Then, of course, there will be signs telling you not to smoke within 250 yards of any inhabitable structure, and more signs explaining that the town centre you're entering is off limits to offroad vehicles.

I can smell this one coming. There is such a palpable sense of hate and bile among ordinary road users that if big 4x4s were to be banned from builtup areas the roads would doubtless immediately unjam themselves. I agree with you all. I too think these schoolrun mums in automotive leviathans should be horsewhipped to within an inch of their lives. And I'm speaking as someone who actually owns one.

But the trouble is that 4x4s are like nuclear weapons. Because you've got one, I can't put my kids in a normal hatchback, because if we were to crash into one another yours would survive and mine wouldn't. So I have to have one too.