Committed as it is to public service, Dorset County Council and its transport contractors are proposing to withdraw a whole raft of local bus routes.

I can speak only for the 210 Litton Cheney to Bridport service but I am sure that it is no different from all the others in that it is, oh, so much more than just a bus.

At present it runs through Burton Bradstock, Shipton Gorge and Walditch and back on a daily basis.

Often it is close to empty.

On Saturdays it is a very different story and there is usually standing room only so naturally this is the service that DCC plans to stop.

The driver tells me that on a recent Saturday when every seat was filled and he carried a further 13 standing passengers, he collected barely £3.50 in fares.

The word in the bus queue is that drivers are paid time and half for weekend working, so it is just about possible to sympathise with the economic arguments for, erm, restructuring the service but they are dwarfed by the social arguments for leaving it alone.

The little journey is in itself a social event, a travelling gossip shop for people from neighbouring villages who would rarely meet without it.

Invariably, you disembark with a warm sense of community which is not to be found in the town’s car parks.

It might be stretching it to suggest that the shopkeepers of Bridport would struggle without the bus-pass carriers’ custom, but bear in mind that the biggest, fattest retailer in the land trades under the slogan, ‘Every little helps’.

Back in the queue, opinion shares DCC’s concerns over costs but suggests that rather than abolish the most popular service of the week, the empty buses be taken off the road.

We could manage, we agree, without transport on Tuesdays and Thursdays and even at a push, Fridays.

But for Heaven’s sake, leave the market days alone and whatever else, don’t leave us to ring up for a bus which never arrives like the hapless inhabitants of those scattered hamlets north of the A35.

Elisabeth Dunn Many Sparrows Walditch