Hotel de Ville

So the plans to turn the Beachcomber into a granny farm have been kicked into the long grass and now the jubilant town council is giddy with excitement about the site's potential. We can only hope that Councillor Jon Freeman was getting mixed up with his words, or was else misquoted, when the Gazette reported him as saying there could be a community centre that would be "a permanent home for the young and the old". Does that mean we'll all be forced to live there? Suddenly the McCarthy & Stone proposals don't seem quite so extreme after all.

The idea of the council somehow taking control of the building and running it as a civic hotel brings an unexpected, and somehow heartwarming, hint of Soviet central planning to our Liberal Democrat coast. I can just picture the viscose brown curtains in every room, the shared shower facilities, the unbranded mints under the lumpy pillows.

In addition to a hotel and community centre, the council also dreams of "affordable housing" on the Beachcomber site. The plot must be an awful lot bigger than I realised. If so, can I also request a swimming pool and cinema, a piazza with space for performing art and open-air concerts, a petting zoo, an observation tower designed by Frank Gehry, an ice rink, a boating lake and an artificial ski slope?

Well, they asked for ideas.