IT is with interest that I read Your Letters in the Malvern Gazette every week. I read of people's concerns regarding the theatre. I read of selfish people complaining about noise from the Three Counties Show-ground and I read endlessly about dog mess being left on the common land.

While I understand these issues are of concern to many people, it seems to me there is an issue of far greater importance for the town of Malvern, that of the lawlessness and wilful damage done on our streets.

I live on Wyche Road and my car is parked on the street at night, as are the cars of countless others in Malvern. It has become a monotonous feature of Saturday nights recently, that as the inebriants spill out from the nearby pub and walk down Wyche Road to Malvern, they need to express their new found courage by causing damage to my property.

To date I have had to replace three wing mirrors at a cost of over £150 each, and recently I have had to rescue the wing mirror from my wife's car from the road where it had been thrown, and spent half of my Sunday (my only day off from work) trying to repair and reinstate it.

Calls to the police seem to meet with little, or in our case no response at all these days.

Indeed, it seems that despite Malvern's rapid growth rate, and the exorbitant taxes we pay for the privilege of living in this beautiful part of the country, we don't even rate a full-time police station.

My daughter lives in Malvern, on Albert Park Road. She has had her car badly damaged by yobs throwing beer bottles into the back of it as they drive past, she would like to replace her car with a newer model, but as she says 'what is the point'? It will just be a newer, more expensive target for these idiots.

So what is the ordinary working bloke supposed to do? He can sit back meekly and fret as his hard earned property is devalued by a creature that has nothing, probably does nothing, and never will amount to anything. He can take a vigilante stance and risk getting sued by the yob involved, or charged by the police. He can erect security cameras at enormous cost and sit up all night monitoring them. He could (and maybe should) oppose the licence renewal of the pubs involved in selling these people alcohol in the first place.

The vast majority of our kids are decent citizens, as ever it is the small minority who set the rot. As with any bad apple you cut it out of the barrel before it infects the rest.

Our Judiciary seem unwilling or unable to take control of these issues, being more concerned with the rights of the offender, thus leaving the police to struggle within a vacuous, frustrating system that is overburdened with paper-work.

We are being told now that we must not smack our children. It is this very lack of authority and parental control that has bestowed this problem of lawlessness upon us.

My perception is that if I state that I am going to buy a gun and wait for these creatures with the sole intention of protecting my property, the law will very soon (and rightly so) be banging on my door with the SWAT squad in tow.

If I complain about the endless stream of cars that scream down Wyche Road (a 30 mph limit) at far in excess of the speed limit, a radar trap may be set up (to raise revenue). But on the issue of my property being damaged or my rights as a citizen to have the quiet enjoyment of my home, I am unmistakably, irrefutably, indubitably on my own.

Barry Pearson, Wyche Road, Malvern.