Melksham
Yeovil Pen Mill
Weymouth station the old excursion platforms, now the main ones.
Weymouth quay by the Nothe fort
Hamworthy station
Hamworthy Quay
Poole station
Spot on.
Tomorrow I will be seeing people off from Melksham to Weymouth but not travelling all the way. We have a further guest arriving from Ukraine and I'll be at Bristol Airport to greet her - exceptionally, this is a "drive" trip; there will be several of us going to greet her, and after a flight to a new country, only having a few words of the language, and potentially with luggage, it makes sense. Having the car gives us flexibility too.
I have not written so much about the Ukrainian situation on here of late. And to some extent is has passed out of the headlines. The initial flood of refugees is over, and I don't know our new arrival's story yet - not that I would shout it here as it would be recognisable. But I did meet another couple and their recently arrived guest in Trowbridge earlier this week. She lived in Luhansk prior to the war - Ukrainian but in "bandit territory" if you would like to call it that, and she fled ... to Bucha ... where in the aftermath of atrocities, anyone coming from the east of Ukraine has been regarded with at least an element of suspicion and that just became too much. She's now in Wiltshire - lovely person, well qualified ... knows she cannot visit her parents in Luhansk for the foreseeable future.
I am not one for fly-posting. But a poster in Weymouth last Saturday was promoting a protest against the mooring of a floating accommodation unit in Portland Harbour for asylum seekers while their cases are considered. There is considerable concern about these people being housed in there, with the effect of 500 people on the local health and welfare systems, communities, security etc.; in my view, understandable but misguided and had I been there tomorrow I would have been tempted to watch in support or join the protest, calling for these people to be treated for what they are - people. One of my regrets is that, prior to the Ukrainian situation, there was no opportunity to help, and that even now it is iimited to just that country. I don't know what the solution is, but is is not to park barges in Portland Harbour to put people on for years while their cases are looked into, nor is it to ship them - already vulnerable - off to Africa. Clearly, a solution needs to dissuade people from having their lives risked crossing dangerous waters, and dissuading people from profiting from their misery by human trafficking - but the solution is not to compound that misery by making them wait for three years, floating in a town where they are not comfortable.
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