Funfare for the Common Man

History really does repeat itself. It wasn’t funny then, it isn’t funny now, but has reached theatre-of-the-absurd proportions. For long-time loyal readers, this is all familiar ground, covered multiple times before. But let’s start from the beginning. Or rather, now: as most of you know, I am here in Ukraine. You might be aware that Ukraine is in the news rather a lot these days. Or rather, these hours. Let’s rewind: I spent much of my childhood, much of the 80s and early 90s in Europe, where a slowly simmering Cold War was fizzling out. I didn’t grow up with any type of existential fear, but there was always that looming concern that something might kick off between the US and the Soviets. I grew up in an American military household, and my old man’s mantra was ‘better dead than red’. The Soviet Union, and the lurking threat of communism on our doorstep, was the big enemy. In 1984, just before going on air to give his weekly radio address to the American people, Ronald Reagan said, i...

'Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.' Walt Whitman This was a trip that really made me feel my age, to borrow from Jarvis Cocker *. I’ve done plenty of budget travelling and backpacking in my time, and for the most part I still enjoy it – when you’re on the road for a month, you have to do so on a budget, let’s face it – but in my cantankerous old ways, I have a hard time putting up with the crap that comes with staying in youth hostels. Whenever possible, I opt for a single room, but in many cases, you’re still faced with lots of noise and other general tomfoolery (like loud, idiotic backpackers talking utter nonsense till the wee hours of the morning). I think I’ve reached my limit when it comes to sharing rooms in hostels, not that I was ever much of a fan of it to begin with. In Lviv I stayed at the Kosmonaut Hostel where I was kept awake every night by French and...

  I’ve got a lot of stories to tell from a month of summer travels, but let’s begin by going back into the past, to just over a year before my 2011 travels commenced. We’ll call this the PROLOGUE : Lviv: 16-21 June 2010 Regular and semi-regular readers will have different recollections of my tales from the summer of 2010: Romania-Moldova-Transdniestria-Ukraine-Poland. Much of that has been covered in varying degrees of depth on the Layman’s Guide (I especially love my rambling, blabbering Tiraspol post ). Interspersed amongst my ditties were missives about the World Cup, which I fear alienated a few too many readers. After my wretchedly poor World Cup preview, which provoked torrents of abuse and vitriol, I felt that I had to keep up some momentum and thus produced a few perfunctory pieces of inchoate bile where I ruminated on various matches and theorized in way too great depth. Blah blah blah indeed. I have also, from time to time, referred to the splendid ‘new’ collection o...