Let's turn Swindon into a new theme park called Thames Waterworld

With our flooded public spaces, roads turned into challenging whitewater rivers and the occasional fountain of dead rats springing picturesquely from a displaced drain cover, who could resist?

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The Barrie Hudson Column

Barrie Hudson is a known quantity when it comes to writing words. Sometimes he even spells them correctly. In fact he has been writing words in the Swindon area for more than two decades. First of all for the Swindon Advertiser and then for Swindon Link and now for The Ink. Here are some of his words…

Let’s think of the floods not as an entirely avoidable unpleasantness but as an opportunity to make a killing on the tourist market

There’s an old saying that when life hands you lemons you should make lemonade.

It embodies a dynamic, can-do attitude that should be encouraged, especially during trying times.

In the same spirit, when life hands you a drainage system presided over by Thames Water and the odd slopey-shouldered Whitehall department that doesn’t know anywhere outside the M25 from a hole in the ground, or an ordinary person from a green axolotl called Andrew for that matter, I say make the best of it and make some cash at the same time.

That’s why I’m putting together a plan to turn Swindon into a gigantic temporary theme park called Thames Waterworld every time we have some heavier than normal rain or when somebody fails to attach a pipe properly.

Obviously, what with Swindon being one of the most economically vital towns in the nation, working harder and better and producing more revenue than a whole lot of much larger towns and cities, we can’t be a theme park every day of the week or even for more than a few days a year, but on the occasions when the streets are awash there’s no reason why we can’t go into Thames Waterworld mode.

After all, many of us can’t get to work on those days anyway.

We in Swindon are nothing if not pioneers, so perhaps the idea might eventually be franchised out to other communities in this neck of the woods.

It’s early days yet, but I’ve written the first draft of a blurb for the brochure and the website. I thought of bringing in a professional to do it, one of those London PR consultants called Hadley or Hydrangea who wears annoying shoes, charges local authorities and Government departments a third of a million quid to design a logo consisting of three squiggly lines and a slogan such as ‘Be One with the Pigeons’, and generally gives you the uneasy feeling that you’d never tire of hitting them with a big rock. However, as I’m doing all this off my own bat I can’t afford the expense.