PERHAPS it's the number of stories we've done about Second World War veterans this past week, but I can't help thinking how important our past is to our present and future.

We reported on the death of Newport D Day veteran Frank James, who once told our reporter that while honours from the French government were all very well, he "didn't do it for the bloody medals".

And we reported on the publication of the memoirs of Caldicot man Reg Taylor, a former Prisoner of War who witnessed at first hand the destruction of Dresden. He recently celebrated his 100th birthday.

It's so important that their stories are told and remembered, for those of us lucky enough not to have to endure what they did.

For men like these, the past is with them every day.

And how easy it is for the rest of us to forget that the past is always among us - that these men whose lives were shaped by momentous world events are among us.

How easy to lose sight of the fact that our heritage is of vital importance.

It informs who we are, we are steeped in it.

It is all around us - from the wheels above Big Pit, to the castles of Monmouthshire, to the ornate facades of some of the buildings built by the profits of the docks trade in Newport City Centre.

We absorb it by osmosis.

We accept the good of it, try to change the bad.

Which is why, for a number of us, the uncertainty surrounding the future of Newport's Museum and Art Gallery is troubling.

Here is the repository of our past and of our city's culture.

Newport has had a museum and art gallery since 1888.

Now, it cares for more than 70,000 objects - the oldest dating to the Prehistoric periods before people could write.

There are Roman, Medieval, Viking and Norman artefacts.

It tells the social history of our city with 20,700 objects reflecting the everyday lives of ordinary people in Newport and the surrounding areas over the last 200 years.

It houses the Transporter Bridge archive and the Chartist collection.

Newport Art Gallery’s collections of paintings, watercolours, decorative ceramics, contemporary prints and craft incorporate work by Sir Stanley Spencer, Sir William Russell Flint, L.S.Lowry, Dame Laura Knight, Edward Wadsworth, Stanhope Forbes, Charles Spencelayh. Elinor Bellingham-Smith, Carel Weight, Hans Feibusch, Stephen Conroy, and the 19th century Newport artist James Flewitt Mullock.

The current crisis in public finances, imposed on councils in a drip-down effect from central government, means that tough decisions have to be made.

Councils have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in our society, they have a legal duty to our children.

But, amid the tough decisions which have to be made, we must ensure that whatever happens with the collections amassed at Newport Museum and Art Gallery, short term thinking does not scar the preservation of our future heritage.

Newport council says it is looking at options to ensure there is a museum and an art gallery presence in the city centre.

I hope that it looks at those options very carefully indeed.

After all, what self-respecting city would have no presence for its own heritage in its city centre?

What short term thinking would harm the future of a potential footfall driver in the city centre, which needs all the visitors it can get?

Newport city centre's parlous state in the past few years has been contributed to by an over-reliance on the lure of shops. That is something the council has already started putting straight with its Vibrant and Viable places grants to bring homes back into the heart of the city.

And that is to be welcomed.

What the council should do now is prove to its electorate that our heritage is important - that they merely sit in its guardianship for generations to come.

This council still has some way to go to mend the fences broken in the way it handled the Chartist mural demolition, to prove it has learned the lesson that our heritage belongs to all of us, not just to those whom we elect.

Collections which have survived two world wars, economic booms and depressions, and governments of all hues, deserve to have pride of place in our city's regeneration.

This is the city of the Chartists - a place which has pride in its past.

Let's display that.