IT’S very comforting and cheering for veterans such as me that the debate continues in this newspaper over Southend Pier.

In the weeks since last I wrote of my concern for the pier, readers galore have contributed thoughts and views, clearly and extensively confirming widespread and deep public worries.

The town’s elected leaders have promised that Southend’s single most famous asset will undergo an expensive and urgently-needed facelift and repair job before too much longer. But this, of course, is a mere step along the way to what must be a guaranteed brighter future and a pier that will turn into a profitable asset.

So, how might this be achieved? When might hopes and dreams become a reality?

No one seems to have the answers. I regret I don’t.

I do, however, have one suggestion to put forward for consideration.

The present elected council seems intent on continuing the idea mooted by predecessors that an estimated £50million should be spent on a museum in the cliffs garden, close to the pier’s entrance. Why? What for?

Southend has plenty of lovely museums, all with space to fill and all desperately needing magnetic attractions to pull in visitors.

Why not, then, budget those millions for use in restoring the pier? And might, in time, a particular dream of my own for the pierhead then be realised?

I have long believed the pier’s world renown and its place at the mouth of one of the world’s most famous rivers, the Thames, makes it the ideal place – the right and proper place – for a sophisticated, hands-on, technically-advanced, widescreen theatre.

It would feature films and views of the pier of the past – and, for visitors and especially for school parties, it surely would be a grand attraction, a magnetic draw.

It could encompass a historic record of the pier, featuring its vital and now often forgotten, wartime role. It could highlight events and incidents of the past and follow on film the Thames to and from London, with up-to-date technology pinpointing where vessels are from or where they are going to and how they are manned and what they carry.

There is, too, a mass of professional and amateur written and filmed material about our pier which could be gathered to boost the archive and feed such a 21st century pierhead theatre of dreams.

Can you imagine this theatre – a centre of the most advanced technology – packing in the pier’s masses of paying customers, filled by parties of students from our own neighbourhoods and from much farther places, viewing the enthralling story of the Thames past, present and future?

Can you imagine them sitting at screens in other sections of the complex, for hands-on, compelling lessons in the history of our pier, our town, our Thames?

Might this dream come true, one day? Yes – please!