This sounds encouraging and fascinating. I would certainly be interested in hearing more details. How did you go about finding a suitable cargo ship? Did you have an opportunity to see the space on offer before booking? What space did you have (both yours and communally available). Did you eat with all the shipworkers?

I know Theo Simon, though not well. He has been campaigning on green issues for very many years, and his band, Seize The Day, have played at numerous fundraising events for green groups, and are very good. He also stood as a parliamentary candidate a few years ago in his home constituency, and got a good vote.

I have had the same dilemma, as my two brothers both live in Australia, and I have never visited as I don't wish to fly, largely for environmental reasons though for others as well. I did spend a lot of time looking at how to get there without flying and it wasn't easy, and I'm not keen on travelling on a freight carrying ship, so realistically almost impossible without finding someone who will carry you by boat. Trains and ferries in theory could get you as far as Indonesia, but there are no connections from there into Australia.

Having now reached my 70s, and finding long distance travel less inviting by the day, I may well take my one flight this century at some point soon to at least get to see them there. I live a low impact life as it is, so in terms of carbon output can probably "afford" it.

We are away over both Christmas and new year, but returning to Bath in between. Both will be long train journeys, and no doubt fraught with difficulties. I will be travelling on Sunday (Christmas Eve) to north Wales, and then we will be heading down to Cornwall for the new year. Given the experiences of train travel over the last few months, I can't say I'm looking forward to it.

The south Wales map has been put in to make the rest of us jealous! Many of those stations didn't exist when I lived in Cardiff as a student.

I think it has to be sometime from 2014 onwards (when Pye Corner opened).

3 is presumably between Melksham and Westbury?

1 I would guess is Bristol's Floating Harbour viewed from the Southville side looking west.

The first quote uses kilometres, the second and third use miles, which is why there is such a large disparity. It would have been far more helpful to use the same measurements for both.

183,300 miles plus 4,300 miles is quite a bit less than 422,000km, but the disparity here is made up of private roads, which I assume include both publically usable roads and private accesses.

My very thought.

This is madness.

Another little anecdote. I was making the short journey from Trowbridge to Bath yesterday afternoon. We were on the edge of the heavy rain area and this line didn't flood, but at Trowbridge I found my train to Oldfield Park was cancelled and the next to Bath Spa wasn't due for 40 minutes, and the following one to Oldfield Park was also cancelled. I came back for the Bath Spa train to find various people had been waiting for an hour there, with very few seats and only minimal shelter, and that the later cancelled train was now showing as 'on time'. However, in the next few minutes both it and the Bath Spa train showed some minutes delay, and the Oldfield Park train then went to just being delayed. There was a lot of frustration there and confusion with the different messages coming up on the screen. Eventually the Bath Spa train arrived a few minutes late and I got that. Probably just as well, as of course at Bath there was a huge number of people waiting to get on, due to the market there, and it was only two carriages.

Just another little anecdote - I can't actually remember the last time I made a journey which didn't involve some disruption. As has been already said, we have just got used to having to wait longer than we should, or having make alternative plans in case of cancellations.

I should have added that the place that obviously could benefit from a later service on that screen is Melksham.

1 is Westbury.

On a more serious note, I don't understand how mistakes like this are made. They are not that uncommon. Earlier this year I was on a train (IIRC^▸ (if I recall/remember/read correctly) Cardiff to Portsmouth) in which the screens were showing a completely different route (IIRC it was a route much further down in the south-west, possibly one of the Devon branch lines). Nothing was ever announced about it.

The 1953 East coast floods are a good example to study. 307 lives lost altogether, but as with most extreme weather events, the damage was local, and the effect in those localities was immense, while for much of the country it would have been forgotten about quite quickly. 59 were killed in Canvey Island, a small town on the Essex coast, and 35 in Jaywick, a much smaller Essex community. 41 in Felixstowe and 31 in Hunstanton. If it happened today, one advantage we would have is that news of the events would spread much more quickly, so some awareness of what was happening in Hunstanton would have been known in Essex before the damage occurred there. But the scale of damage would not be known until it happened. So today's instant communications, 24 hours news, social media and so on, should reduce the likelihood of loss of life, but would be unlikely to eliminate it (and would obviously have no effect on the scale of damage).

To an extent, Britain has been lucky with extreme weather events so far. The 1953 floods killed 1800 in the Netherlands. Last winter, immense flooding occurred in much of the nearby continent, and just these last few weeks, the worst of the storms affected northern France rather than England. Wildfires, extreme heat events, all have affected nearby countries more than us. But it won't always be like that, and one day climate change will impact this country in ways that most people will think are unimaginable.

Do you mean that the Coffee Shop archives do not go back that far? 

I thought November 31st was when they will be trying out the new hourly service to Pilning just for one day.