Right, let’s see what all the fuss is about. I jump in the car and drive along Paisley Road West and there it is. A big hairy man and a big hairy cow. The man, a grumpy-faced piper in a Jimmy Edwards tache, is standing in front of the cow and a perplexed stag. Behind him are the noble purple hills of the Highlands; across the road are the noble red and yellow letters of Farmfoods, Great Food, Amazing Prices.

This is Glasgow’s latest mural and I like it, sort of, bear with me. It’s not great art obviously: stick Lulu in there and you’d have all the top five cliches of Scotland; the knees aren’t great either. But I know this part of the city and it’s not the prettiest and it hasn’t been well served by development (and lack of development) and suddenly a drab wall across the road from Farmfoods has been transformed and is colourful and dramatic and eye-catching. Do I like it? Yes, I like it.

But not everyone’s happy, because we love a good moan. What’s it got to do with Glasgow? they say. Why hasn’t the money been spent on something more useful? Why not fix the city’s tenements rather than paint the ends of them? One curmudgeonly local said we should be focusing on the embarrassing state of the city instead and that he couldn’t imagine busloads of tourists coming to see a painting on the end of some flats. He may be right. He probably is.

But let me tell you about the effect of the murals. Walk around near one of my favourite pubs in Glasgow, the Viceroy in Kinning Park, and you’ll quite often bump into tourists looking for “the glass mural”. It’s a huge painting by the artist Rogue One on the back wall of the Viceroy that creates the illusion you’re standing inside a giant beer glass and people have come from all over the place – Colombia, Argentina, Berlin, New York – to have their picture taken with it. Not busloads maybe, but lots of them.

The owners of the Viceroy have been so delighted with the glass mural in fact that they’ve commissioned another one from Rogue One for their beer garden at the back, which is in the final stages of being painted right now. Ordinary-looking walls are being transformed into a celebration of some of the tropical tastes they sell at the bar and it’s brilliant. Go and order a beer or a cocktail and take a look.

A couple of my other favourites: the Strathclyde University mural on George Street which is a mad mix of fact and fiction and includes the woman who first produced Doctor Who and the man whose experiments on corpses are thought to have inspired Frankenstein. And the side of the university’s rather ugly building on North Portland Street,a sea of students with shiny faces, pleased to be here and keen to learn.

Obviously, we have to be careful to keep control of the situation. You may have noticed, for example, the murals that went up on the tenement on Duke Street, just past the distillery. First there was a giant goldfish; then there was a giant pair of legs in orange trousers. The art was quite good, but the murals were put up, without permission, to advertise a bank account switch service and Clarks shoes, the companies apparently getting round the planning rules by putting the murals up then painting over them again within four weeks.

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I would say this is not the way we want to go: murals as adverts will lead to walls full of KFC chickens and loo-roll puppies. But as a way of marking and celebrating the history and culture of Glasgow, the mural is perfect. Down at the Clutha bar for instance, you can play a game of spot-the-face and guess the connection to Glasgow: Stan Laurel (the Panopticon), Rupert Everett (the Citz) and so on.

We also need to look at the purpose murals can play in a city that’s struggling to maintain its architecture and a city, let’s be honest, that’s struggling to stay clean and tidy. Some of the folk who were moaning about the bagpipe mural in Cardonald suggested the money that had been spent on it (and we don’t know the exact figure yet) should have been spent instead on cleaning and maintenance of the tenements and the streets and to an extent I understand the argument. The city’s in a state, the council’s budget is under pressure, so perhaps the city should be focusing its money on maintenance and cleanliness.

However, the money for the Cardonald mural came from the council’s Neighbourhood Infrastructure Improvement Fund which allocated £1million to improvements across the city with community representatives having a say on how the cash was spent. The money was also in addition to the funds spent on roads, lighting and infrastructure. And much as I recognise the need to clean up and improve Glasgow, do we want everything to be reduced to the utilitarian basics? Do we want everything to be reduced to rubbish?

(Image: Part of the new mural at the Viceroy)

And there’s something else as well: the murals of Glasgow can be good for us in a way that public art often isn’t. Often, public art is up on a plinth and celebrates hyphenated major-generals or it’s in a gallery and is controlled by hyphenated curators who’ll explain on little information boards why we are all terrible, racist people who should apologise for who we used to be. The mural is different: it’s out on the street, its often directly connected to the local community and it often has a loud, lairy, unstuffy quality that suits Glasgow. It’s a splash of paint on the Victorians; it’s the traffic cone on Wellington’s head.

So go and have a look at the new piper in Cardonald and tell me what you think. I know it’s not the best painting in the world, and I know the imagery is a bit cliched, and I know the knees aren’t great, but I’ve seen the mural artists at work and it’s quite a technical achievement. And while we wait, and wait, for an answer to Glasgow’s deeper problems – the decaying, neglected buildings, the dirty and littered streets, the shame of Sauchiehall Street – at least we can enjoy the temporary, cosmetic solution of the murals. At least we look up from the greys and the browns at the purples and the reds. I feel a little cheered, a little distracted, and that’s good.