A BROTHEL in Commercial Road was shut down by Swindon magistrates the other day.

Details of a report submitted by the police included two naked men being found with two women and a large amount of cash.

On another occasion a dozen used contraceptives were found stuffed into a duvet, and the magistrates also heard that one charming gentlemen contracted a disease and passed it on to his wife.

I won’t name the disease in case you’re having breakfast, but let’s just say the collective term is a round of applause.

As usual when something like this happens, people have been wondering how to deal with the ongoing problem of brothels.

Maybe I’m being a bit controversial here, but surely the best way of dealing with the issue is to tackle the horrible, inadequate little rodents who use the places?

I reckon we should change the law to have a CCTV camera covering the door of every business advertising itself as a massage parlour or similar.

Each camera would have to be linked to a sealed drive, which could only be examined on the order of a judge after a successful police raid.

Those raids, as is currently the case, would only happen if the police were faced with strong evidence of wrongdoing, such as owners with dodgy records.

Or trucks delivering industrial quantities of rice pudding and spaghetti hoops at regular intervals.

Or passers-by reporting strange cries from within, such as might be made by a Trafalgar-era sailor on the receiving end of a lashing - or somebody drowning in rice pudding.

Legitimate massage parlours and their customers would have nothing to fear; indeed, they would benefit because the industry and its clients would no longer be as tainted by wrongful associations.

Like to visit your local parlour because Doris has a punch like a freight train that’s just the thing for realigning your dodgy shoulder? Great stuff!

Like to visit because Bob and Veronica do a wonderful thing with your poor, aching spine that sounds like somebody running bubble wrap through a mangle and leaves you feeling as good as new and ready for another week of toil? Have at it!

However, if a place was identified as a brothel, it would be time to crack open that trusty old hard drive and put the contents online, so everybody could find out who the clientele were.

“Hmm,” the viewers would say, “I wonder which of the establishment’s services you were there to receive.

“Was it sitting in a bath of tepid custard and pastry while being flogged with stout stalks of rhubarb by a person shouting, ‘Taste the whip, now crumble for me’?

“Was it being coated in wood glue, rolling in feathers and then being forced to climb into a small cage and whistle piteously while a woman dressed as the late Dame Margaret Rutherford sternly informed you that naughty budgies such as yourself would be sent to bed with no cuttlefish?

“Was it the alternate service involving a woman dressed as a cuttlefish?

“Or was it that activity which remains illegal in all but three American states - the one with the parcel tape, the piece of string, the trestle table, the copy of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, the fairy lights, the industrial mincer, the stuffed armadillo and the mechanical pencil?”

I’ve suggested this solution or something like it many a time in the past, but nobody with the power to make my vision a reality has ever got around to doing so.

I really can’t think why.

After all, they are without exception people of impeccable moral character and decency.

It’s not as though my plan would inconvenience any of them.