I have also spoken to groups at Banham, Stanton and the United Reformed Church in Diss, as well as leading a session at the Denny Centre on the town in wartime.

This included a specially written episode of Dad's Army for them to act out.

One of the groups contributing to the 18th Century tapestry exhibition in the Tom Paine Festival had decided he was not a very nice man and wanted me to go along and reassure them.

All these are an important part of museum outreach work. Anything which promotes the museum and takes the idea of it out to people, is significant.

The expression "It ought to be in a museum" (ie it is dead) is the old way of looking at things.

A sleepy steward nodding over a book, while two people come and go in silence, is not the way it should be.

This is why I am pleased with anything that breathes fresh life into the museum.

We won a new audience via the Grammar School display. This year we have also gained accreditation, opened a new store, been on national television and local radio, brought out our first publication with the Tom Paine booklet, contributed to the new CD of Diss, taken part in the carnival, helped it take place with funding and gained Awards For All funding for the Paine Festival.

We also had a stall at the Burston Rally, where I gave the audience a volley of Tom Paine from the stage.

I wrote to Gordon Brown's office to tell them about the commemoration and the warm response it got at Burston. I suggested that, with the radical Left needing a boost, the Labour party would do well to ally itself to the celebrations.

I got a reply saying the PM had noted my comments and would certainly bear them in mind. (The White House has not replied yet.)

Local history is part of what we are and the museum should be at the centre of it. People ought to know that, in Paine's young days at Thetford, 31 of the 2,000 inhabitants had the vote, simply because they were landowners.

History is largely a tale of the people being treated as the "swinish multitude", in Edmund Burke's phrase, with their needs ignored and their wishes overruled.

The museum will always be on the side of the people.

Basil Abbott is manager of Diss Museum.