I WAS happy to learn about the 80 grand Heritage Lottery Fund grant to Swindon Museum and Art Gallery.

Most people in this borough are stunned to discover that we have one of the finest collections of art and artefacts outside London, as we only have the space to display a small fraction of it.

Fortunately we’ve also been given £95,000 by the Arts Council to help sort out a new museum and gallery, so things are finally on the up-and-up.

The usual procedure now would be for the council to employ consultants to work out strategies and whatnot, but I have a better idea: employ me instead, as I’ll do you a better job for a simple fridge-load of beer.

I absolutely guarantee I can arrange for the new place to be mobbed with visitors, all of whom will be only too happy to make donations, pay top whack for rubber dinosaurs in the gift shop and shell out even more dosh in the cafe.

For starters, we need to have some highly dangerous machines dating from the Industrial Revolution. If we don’t have any, we can display some completely made-up dangerous machines instead, such as a rotary clothesline with three dozen rusty scythe blades welded to it, and a steam engine attached to drive the thing at about 8,000 revs.

It won’t matter what we put on the label – we could say it’s for skinning whales or punishing heretics or something – because that’s not the point. No, the point is for it to become a legendary must-see attraction by severely mutilating any dimwit who ignores the big signs saying ‘Danger.’ We had several of these things in my local museum when I was a kid up North, and that museum did better business every time some less-than-bright kid on a school trip went home in a bucket or ended up woven into a stout overcoat.

When I was a kid, incidentally, we assumed class trips to the museum caused the steady decrease of the number taught in the soundproofed room in the school cellar – the one where the desks kept being eaten and the teacher had to wring the slobber from the curtains at certain points in the lunar cycle.

The joke was on us, though, because it turned out that they were being recruited to senior training schemes by gas, electricity and water companies and various Inns of Court. At least three currently sit in the House of Lords and a dozen are judges.

Anyway, a museum cannot prosper with inaccurately-labelled machines alone. It also needs inaccurately-labelled stuffed animals, dinosaur skeletons and other exhibits.

That gharial, for example – the narrow-snouted crocodilian familiar to generations of Swindonians? Let’s have no mention of its fish-based diet and harmlessness to humans.

The new label should say it’s one of a huge colony lurking in the sewers beneath Swindon, each of whom like nothing better than to surface in lavatories and sink their 110 teeth into the bottoms of the unwary.

And the Egyptian mummy? I think he’ll be a bigger draw if visitors somehow get the idea that he presided over dreadful ritual sacrifices, and that if there’s an ‘R’ in the month they’ll find Anubis standing over their bed that very night, demanding innocent blood and some Winalot.

In order to compete with really big establishments such as the British Museum, we’ll also need some statues stolen from various places. As foreign countries tend to object to that sort of thing these days, we’ll have to improvise.

I reckon our best bet is certain out-of-town boot sales where there are lots of blokes with vans full of garden ornaments. Admittedly a gnome isn’t the Elgin Marbles but we’ve all got to start somewhere.

SHARE THE STINK

THERE’S still a hell of a smell down at the Chapel Farm waste disposal site.

In spite of attempts to solve the problem, the gaseous stench of rotting landfill still drifts among nearby homes, nauseating residents.

The company responsible, Hills Waste, says it has plans to cap the site with clay and close it, but this will entail first dumping more material there.

Perhaps as a show of good faith with the community it’s currently blighting, the company could arrange for some of its bosses to live on site until the process is complete.

If they had an insight into what it’s like to live under such revolting conditions, day after day, week after week and month after month, they might even bring the capping process forward a little.

However, I suspect residents shouldn’t hold their breath while awaiting such a visit – much as they might wish they could.

N-ICE AND QUIET

A BIG ‘thank you’ to the Empire multiplex, which is hosting a wealth of fundraising activities for our 160 Appeal in aid of Prospect Hospice on Tuesday, April 8.

They include scoops of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in exchange for a donation, whether you’re a customer or not.

I hope people turn up in droves to make a donation, buy a ticket and enjoy an ice cream. In fact, I hope Empire manages to start a trend for ice cream becoming the most popular food for all cinemagoers everywhere.

Ice cream or anything else that doesn’t crunch.

A SICK JOKE

DID you read about the man who was battered unconscious in a Swindon supermarket car park by an 11-strong gang of living sewage?

Down at the joke shop – sorry, I mean the court – one of their pitiless, dead-eyed number was jailed for four years. In other words, he’ll be out in two or less.

Meanwhile, down at the clown college – sorry, I mean the CPS or wherever the charging decisions were taken in this case – it was decided that no other members of the gang should face court.

I’m sure we’d all like to give thanks to our protectors yet again for another job well done.

Either that or point out that calling them useless would be an insult to chocolate fireguards the length and breadth of Britain.