Graffiti is "...a pathetic attempt to emerge, to be visible..." said one of the talking heads during a short video clip on the problem of urban doodling and scribbling in Rome.

I'm fifty-fifty here. Part of me enjoys seeing splashes of exuberant hieroglyphics lighting up odd nooks and crannies, those niches of city places that lay forgotten, until the street artist turns up and then they shimmer brightly in to life. Tropical colours in a wan, mid-Atlantic setting in that respect.

At the same time, you would be able to hear my teeth gnashing on another planet if I went outside and found a giant, randomly shaped tag, zig-zagging across the sides of the building I live in. Remember I'm a Brit, and all of us carries a strain of nimbyism. Mine might be detectable only at trace levels, nevertheless it's still there.

Where I do stand back and wonder is just what do some slogans mean. Is there a meaning even?

Let's get the common ones out of the way first. Applying the first law of Rumsfeld, then we know what we know, which is: political are easily understood; same goes for territorial boundary marking - W10 posse rulz this 'hood, for instance; love and heartbreak, straightforward enough, maybe too much in cases; and finally, the public address to the football team is as direct and explicable as the rest.

But it's the other category, the head-scratching, the arcane, the mysterious. What for instance, just what, did this graffiti artist in Doncaster, have in mind when they were spraying " Albert, the kid is ghosting" ?

Who's Albert and should his kid be ghosting, whatever that is? Answers, please, on a postcard. I've tried already back in May, when I first spotted it. I've no idea

"Albert, the kid is ghosting...." In Paris, this would be surreally hip and intelligible only to the select ; in London, it would pass muster as a Banksy slogan, and certainly as a wacky band name; in LA, I could comfortably imagine this line from a forgotten film, but I saw this on a bridge parapet in Doncaster....

Now Doncaster has a certain charm, it's own signature, but prone to gnomic statements like this ? In South Yorkshire, facts are most certainly facts, and this sounds way too avant garde for the good burghers of that town.

Donny folk specialise in bluntness, rough kindness, telling it like it is. These five words have that abrasive texture if you look at them individually and say them separately; it's the fact they're arranged, like ducks in a row, in a declaration I just could n't imagine anyone there saying, but someone did, so what's it all mean. This will be bugging me for days.