This is excellent as far as it goes but, it's a pity that no-one seems to have thought of borrowing a couple of blue and cream trams from Crich to operate for the duration, featuring such traditional conveniences as open platforms, youngsters giving up their seats to oldies and smoking (though certainly not spitting) in the upper saloon.

This kind of enterprise is long overdue and the possible benefits of such enlightened change of direction are endless: tea made with actual tea leaves; creepy movies with real suspense instead of headless zombies in the opening sequences; banks, building societies, estate agencies and mobile phone emporia, banished to the back streets where they belong, making room for real shops where we want them.

Professor Michio Kaku, the theoretical physicist, has suggested that in a billion years or so we will have time machines. Why wait for a billion years? By then, I'll be a doddering old man and would, therefore, suggest that we start sorting things out right now.

True, the cry would go round 'You can't put the clock back.' Defeatist nonsense. Of course we can, and straight away won't be a moment too soon. I realise that wholesale reintroduction of former facilities and conditions yearned for by almost all would be fiercely opposed by such as the health and safety lot, frantically trying to justify their continued existence, and others with a vested interest in creeping drab uniformity but, if we could just get proper street lighting back in place - the sort with standards having integrally cast arms below the lantern for the lamplighter to rest his ladder against - a swift and appropriate solution to that little problem will suggest itself.