Wannabe a Capital of Culture? Here's seven ways to lose the plot.

Organise a "free" concert on the beach and get the lifeboats, hospital, police, locals and ratepayers to pay for the consequences.

License an event with no way of controlling it when the numbers exceed predictions.

Fail to provide waste-disposal facilities for even a few thousand people, let alone 250,000.

The hardly surprising result is debris and broken glass that made not just the beach but the whole city a sea of rubbish, to the delight of many visitors.

Allow the promenade, beachfront properties and beach to be used as a public toilet.

Give the beachmaster the weekend off and when, on Sunday morning, the beach resembles a glass-recycling factory floor, have no way of closing the beach for health and safety.

Provide seven guys to "clean" the beach. This was presumably a clever ploy to allow the tide to do the job on the cheap - witness the state of the sea at the moment.

Use the busiest month of the year to resurface the seafront roads with the resultant chaos that was so bad it made news on national radio.

I am not a killjoy but let's not repeat any more of these beach events until the authorities have the infrastructure and desire to deal with the consequences in place.

-Steve Hayward, steve@european-events.co.uk