EUREKA! I've got it. I have dreamed up the perfect answer to all Malvern's current problems with a completely unique and innovative scheme.

We should turn the whole town into a hands-on interactive museum: to be known as The Malvern Experience.

We seem to have so much trouble trying to decide which parts of the old days are worth keeping, be it gas lamps or old radar aerials or even, dare I say it, ugly old Victorian buildings; so let's keep the lot.

We should have toll houses on all the entrance roads to the town, with vast car parks and charge every visitor a daily fee and something like: "Bring two OAPs and the third gets in free".

The whole town would be traffic free, as we know the phrase, but bear with me and I will expound.

I believe there are many very clever scientists and engineers at TRE/RRE/ RSRE/DERA/DRA/QinetiQ, who are, at worst, under threat of being moved elsewhere or even becoming redundant or even under employed, whom I feel sure could invent, design, manufacture and maintain clever bathchairs and invalid carriages to run on disposable fuel cells or some such device; non-polluting of course; replaceable units available from the Post Office or Consignia; after all we've surely got to keep them employed as well.

Those residents who insist on riding bicycles would have to return to machines of an earlier age, known as velocipedes.

I had thought of bringing back the donkeys for personal transport but we have enough trouble with dog mess, so that's no good.

But these clever electronic experts could surely design robot donkeys.

I think all the recent water features could go, they really haven't added much to the town, but Elgar can definitely stay where he is, looking down Church Street and keeping a benign eye on visitors and locals alike.

In fact this suggests more robots. Those wonderfully clever scientists could have jobs for life by making robot models of various people, such as Queen Victoria, a few royal dukes and princes, George Bernard Shaw, Gilbert and Sullivan, Gladstone, Disraeli, Florence Nightingale, Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, Dr Gully et al; to cruise gently about the streets with a clever scanner in their pockets to clock the visitors; those who clocked the lot would have their entry fee refunded.

Just one further essential would be to change the ex-pharmacist's shop on Belle Vue Terrace back to what it was; after all it couldn't be expensive, could it?!

This leaves the way open to cancel the town council just like that, at the stroke of a pen and get back to common sense with just one area authority. With the vastly increased income from all the visitors - the residents could enjoy a Council Tax holiday for the foreseeable future (in my dream).

Perhaps I should have held this back until April 1, 2002. And a very happy Christmas to all followed by an extremely novel New Year.

MICHAEL CALDICOTT (resident for 43 years), Albert Road South, Malvern.