Like many of those driven to express their views forcefully on The Oxford Times’s website, I see nothing in any way “milestone” – as a police officer hailed it – in the sentence meted out to the graffiti artist whose daubings have done so much to damage Oxford’s environment in recent years.

The vandal is one Charlie Silver, 24, whose tag ‘Soak’ will have been seen by everyone with eyes in their heads.

He became the first person in the city be sent to prison for a graffiti offence, receiving a sentence of ten weeks.

The snag is he won’t actually be spending this time in jail because the sentence will run concurrently with one for drug dealing that he is already serving.

The penalty is the more pathetic when measured against the months of effort put in by police officers to secure his conviction.

It would hardly seem as if all this work was necessary, given that he was arrested with a rucksack full of pens, paint and spray paint, as well as pieces of paper with his trademark ‘Soak’. But this is another instance where the rules of evidence are weighted firmly in favour of the offender.

Inspector Andy Thompson said officers continued to work with graffiti artists, many of whom felt inclined, he said, to perform on a dedicated wall space.

I suppose this was in the mind of the person responsible for the recent message painted on the new bridge across the rail tracks at First Turn, Wolvercote. It says: “Legalise graff walls 2 better our community and so we can paint somin decent.”

I personally doubt whether there can ever be anything decent about graffiti.

In one of his finest poems, W.H. Auden wrote: “The trees encountered on a country stroll/Reveal a lot about a country’s soul . . . A culture is no better than its woods.”

No better also than its walls.