WHENEVER I read about Salisbury’s new community campus I have this weird feeling that I’m in a Harry Potter novel.

Why? Because it appears that the enlarged leisure centre will have an astounding capacity to hold whatever you decide to chuck into it, rather like Mad-Eye Moody’s magical trunk.

This useful item contained, among a great many other things, an invisibility cloak, an assortment of Sneakoscopes and a 10ft deep secret compartment (possibly created with an Undetectable Extension Charm, I’m told) that was used to imprison Dark Wizards, Death Eaters and even poor old Moody himself.

(What wouldn’t I have given, back in my reporting days, for one of those cloaks and a Sneakoscope of my own, to find out when something iffy was in the offing up at Trowbridge? Instead of having to rely on disenchanted councillors.) At the project’s outset we were assured that the campus would house the young music-makers of Bass Connection (now the Sound Emporium), enabling Wiltshire Council to eject them from Grosvenor House and cash in on its development value.

I said at the time that there wouldn’t be enough rehearsal rooms and that people doing yoga might not like all that drumming anyway. All I got were bland assurances that everything would be hunky dory. Now we hear that the yoof are being shunted off to a soundproof bunker on Harnham Hill instead.

I remember, too, being told that the police and their response vehicles were proceeding in the direction of Five Rivers. With its elf ’n’safety hat on, this column queried the wisdom of 999 cars zooming between overexcited children attending pool parties.

It’ll be fine, I was told. They’ll be careful. Now it’s been decided that response cars will carry on operating from their temporary home, Amesbury, while most officers will work out of Bourne Hill. (Might be helpful if Wiltshire could conjure up a few cells out of those changing rooms at the gym, though.) The latest announcement is that the combined Wiltshire and Dorset fire service will have a ‘strategic hub’ there.

A couple of weeks ago Patricia Fagan, who chaired the volunteer group set up by Wiltshire to oversee the campus project, quit in disgust because no-one would tell her what was happening.

She’d only found out about the fire service move at a meeting of Salisbury City Council. Now the future of her entire group is in doubt and Wiltshire’s deputy leader, John Thomson, is talking about creating new ‘project boards’ instead to “ensure everything is open and transparent”. What a load of old Hogwarts! Or should that be hogwash?

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