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  The Houston Art Car Parade has become a massive event over the years. Photo Gallery

We don?t know about you, but we?ve always harboured a secret, shameful urge to drive a car that looks like a puffer fish.

Or a mythical monster. Or even a giant corrugated-iron hen.

But what a dreadful assumption, we hear you cry! Of course you have similar fantasies — like ours, tragically unfulfilled over the years of having to pootle about in cars that just look like cars. And everybody else’s cars at that.

Because, let’s face the facts: it doesn’t matter if your personalised number plate is the perfect pink to match your Toyota Camry. It doesn’t even matter if you add an entire garden of frangipani stickers (except to the Good Taste Police, who know where you live and are probably on the way there right now).

And it certainly doesn’t matter if you add one of those sporty rear spoilers that provide downforce at speeds you haven’t the dimmest hope of reaching on our roads in any car – let alone your docile commuter vehicle.

Nor if you add daggy demin seatcovers that simply brand you as the kind of person who thinks the term Yummy Mummy is desirable, while all around you know it’s code for Delusional Narcissist.

Your car is still going to look like every other Toyota Camry out there. And when it comes to the Toyota Camry, the term ‘every other’ can be taken as a mathematical equivalent to ‘so many it’s not humanly possible to count them because it makes our frontal lobes go all twitchy. And more of them every minute.’

Those paltry efforts at auto individualism crumble before the genius that is the Houston Art Car Parade – an annual event of some 22 years that has developed into the very finest display of vehicular insanity to be found on the planet.

But its roots go back to 1956, when a mailman in Houston, Texas, constructed a manic miniature art park in a vacant lot with garishly painted farm equipment, washing machines and anything else he knew would brighten up the place.

`The Orange Show’, as it was christened, was in danger of being dismantled and binned after he died in 1980, but was saved by some local art lovers who formed the Orange Show Foundation and promoted the display as visionary genius.

In 1984 they commissioned the creation of the now legendary Fruitmobile – a 1966 Ford wagon encrusted with fake fruit – others followed suit, and in 1988 the first annual Houston art Car Parade was held with about 40 vehicles.

It’s become a massive event over the years. The 2009 parade in May featured 264 cars, and more than 250,000 people turned up to watch them cruise through the city and revel in what has become an entire weekend of Art Car activities. And the definition of ‘car’ is wonderfully relaxed, with lawnmowers, scooters, and even rollerbladers and a wheeled bathtub joining in.

Houston’s is the original and probably the biggest Art Car Parade, but the idea has spread to other cities around the world. And we think it should become a mandatory part of every city’s calendar.

Just imagine: puffer fish, monsters and giant hens. Individualist’s paradise. And not a frangipani sticker in sight.