BY all means, stop souped-up sports cars from charging along the cul-de-sac at all hours of the day and night. Be my guest and outlaw cold-callers from cluttering the doorstep and haranguing you to buy their useless plastic tat.

But ban ice-cream vans from churning out “Greensleeves”, out of tune and ever more slowly as they chug around the estate? Sunday afternoons will never be the same again.

Yet this is exactly what the good people of Worcester are thinking about doing. They want to stop the time-honoured English tradition that allows children to pester parents for a Funny Face ice cream every weekend, in spite of the fact that they had their treacle sponge less than an hour earlier.

They want to impose a curfew on the vans before noon and after 7pm, and to bar them from sounding their chimes for longer than four seconds at a go.

Furthermore, if the proposals go ahead, vans will only be able to sound their chimes once every three minutes and they will not be able to return to any given street for two hours.

In other words, Mr Whippy has been given an Asbo, and Worcester City Council says it comes after a spate of complaints.

But can people really be so exercised about a bit of chiming that surely lasts, at most, a quarter of an hour? You’d think they’d be pushed to hear the noise over the whining of their lawnmowers, the screaming of their hedge-trimmers and the bass lines from next door’s barbecue.

You’d actually think the people most cheesed off with the racket of an ice-cream van would be the sellers themselves, who must long for the silence of going-home time.

In fairness, though, they probably have a point in thinking a noise ban would cause them meltdown. As Tom Davison, of the newly world-famous Ice Cream Alliance, said: “It will put sellers out of business. Four seconds is not long enough to hear where a van is.”

One of the quirkier aspects of the proposals is that ice-cream vans must not come within sight of one another.

How are they going to do this? They’d have to devise a special Sat Nav alert (“after 300 yards, turn left to avoid the other van…”) And why do they want to do it, anyway?

Maybe they want to stop them breeding lots of even noisier little vanlets. In which case, they could fit them with extra-strong magnets to repel one another should they get too close.

Last, but by no means least for this intriguing ban, is the idea that the vans must not come within 50 metres of a school or place of worship Now schools, fair enough. Make the kids spend their dinner money on dinner. But places of worship? Are they worried that the congregation will sprint for the door when they hear the siren call?

Come to think of it, though, I’d probably rather have a cider lolly than a Communion wafer.

There’s also the consideration, I suppose, that the vicar might not want “Popeye The Sailor Man” to drown out “For Those In Peril On The Sea”.

The churches could, of course, decide to join the ice-cream vans instead of trying to beat them. Apparently, the Minster has just invested in a load of new bells that can play not just boring old church stuff, but Beethoven and even the Beatles. Combine the Fab Four with a 99 and I’m sure they’d be rolling up for Evensong.