Museum conservators need to be given targets to increase access as well as safety. That'll sort them! I didn't mean that! This is not a re-structure; this is a change in attitude. Conservation staff will, in future, welcome applications for loans - they'll even help to generate them - ‘Come and borrow from us. Please!' they'll plead - because loans will be an excellent way of making their collections more accessible - which is all they ever dream of achieving!

Museums, as a whole, in the future will instinctively want to say yes, not no - because their ambition will be to increase access - not to increase access for its own sake of course - how belittling! - but to increase access to meaning.

Now I hope you begin to feel the power of that little pill. When a museum begins to think about meaning it begins to loosen up. It begins to see its collections not as a dead weight in its gut, but as food for thought.

The waste product is then free to move.

But I'm not suggesting we flush our reserve collections down the toilet. What is of little interest to people today may fascinate many tomorrow.

I suggest museums put what they aren't using - what the public isn't currently primarily interested in - into jointly-owned resource centres - where safe access to all material evidence from the past will be managed by a new breed of archival curators - whose job will be to facilitate research - and not just barricade their own! - and who will encourage loans to safe public venues - anywhere from community centres to major museums.

I envisage, in time, networks of such resource centres within countries and then across Europe and eventually across the world - providing a vast accessible resource to world history. Their existence will free museums to move their collections without feeling they're losing them.

The great shift in attitude will come when curators see their collections - and the collections of all museums - as a resource for public use. There needs to be no change in ownership - only in attitude. And changes in attitude cost nothing in themselves - though they will lead to different sorts of public expenditure in future.

This change in attitude that I dream of - I'm a dreamer, I know, but I'm dangerous, because, as it was said of Karl Marx, I'm a dreamer who thinks. I deal with the practicalities in my The Poetic Museum. There's no such thing as a free lunch - or dinner.

The huge hidden resource of museum collections will be opened up for use - to their own communities and then to the whole world. Europe has, in storage, the heritage of the world. It has a responsibility to the world - but it can start by being responsible to the citizens from many cultures who live within its borders.

Lending, in future, will not be spoon-feeding - because it will be borrower-led, much as we set up the Open Museum in Glasgow when people were invited into our stores to make exhibitions of what interested them for their own communities. Imagine the impact of that, just within the museum community across Europe!

This ambition to increase public understanding can't be realised by museums as they are organised today. The categories in which their collections are arranged are too restrictive. The stories they tell are highly specialised, and for most people, frankly, boring.

Wonderful, fascinating stories of the history of man's relationship to women, of mankind's relationship to nature, of the history of government and of religion - all of them vital issues today - lie untold and cut-up between our scientific, historical and art museums.

The categories in which museums are currently organised are barriers to the growth of public interest. These barriers will be most quickly broken down by changing attitudes to lending. To the barricades! Aux armes, Citoyens! That's my only French.

Museums - on the move - will at last be able to think creatively about what they mean. They won't just ask the question, as they do now, what can my collection give to the public - but ask the much more challenging question - what do the public need to be given. And who knows, with their bowels loosened, museums might start to collect again.

My little pill is a simple one. I hope you're sitting comfortably. Your minds are now free to think not just about how you would like to use your own museum collections for the benefit of your public - but how you would like to use your neighbour's.

Now doesn't that thought go nicely with the digestive juices in your stomach?