COLIN CAMPBELL: Yellow and blue support for families too far from home
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
When I meet my youngest offspring each afternoon at her Inverness primary school and take her home until her parents return from their labours with the NHS, I see other children from her class being picked up by their mum.
They're like all the kids pouring out at 3pm after the bell goes, smiling, laughing, cheerfully fooling around.
But they are an exception. They shouldn't be at that school in the Highland capital.
• Sign up for our free newsletters
They should be playing around and doing what children do with their pals in Ukraine.
They're not alone in this Inverness school as being refugees from a war. There are around 20 Ukrainian children in the primary.
They arrived quite soon after the horrors of conflict struck in their homeland. None of these youngsters spoke any English, which placed an additional burden on teachers. But the teachers set the tone, if it was needed or not, to ensure they were welcomed by everyone with every effort made to counter feelings of being lonely, bewildered strangers in an alien land.
My young school companion, like most of the other older primary children, has at least a basic understanding of why they're there. And on any day she's a bit grumpy about something or other I cajole her into being thankful that she's not had to go through what her Ukrainian classmates have experienced.
Being uprooted from their homes and separated from all they know and love and scattered to the four winds to try and make a new life - for how long they do not know - to a place they'd never been and never heard of has to be a grim, distressing and bewildering experience for any child. But fortunately, from what I hear, they have adapted over time and integrated quite well. But no one could imagine it's been plain sailing for them.
They have since their arrival spent a considerable amount of time in an Inverness hotel which was full of Ukrainian refugees. The Scottish Government took their share of these folk as they arrived in the UK and now they fall within the responsibilities of Highland Council. Their circumstances now I don't know about.
But hotel life must quite quickly get wearying. A room or a couple of rooms for a family on a second or third floor isn't a home. It's somewhere to sleep and to exist, a roof over your head and not much more.
As the war moves into its third year, despite the daily media updates it still seems remote and has ceased to be much of a talking point among people I know. And the death toll keeps mounting - heroically, tragically or senselessly depending on your point of view - into the many tens of thousands.
But every time I see these youngsters and their stoical mother it serves as a genuinely saddening reminder of what the Ukrainians, men, women and children, have gone through and are going through.
Very often the Ness Bridge is lit up in the yellow and blue colours of Ukraine. This is not just a token gesture but something which has meaningful purpose.
Mothers and children like those at my granddaughter's primary school will see it. And I hope it makes them feel a little less far distant from home.
