Funfare for the Common Man

Waiting patiently Interlude 7: One year later 13 February 2023: our darling little girl’s 5th birthday. 13 February 2022: our little girl’s 4th birthday party, a surreal experience overshadowed by the decision we – I? – had just made the day before to leave the next day, my daughter and I. (note to students: this is not a terribly good sentence; please don’t write like this) If you’re a parent, you’ll know the cliché very well: Where has the time gone? They grow up so fast. We left Kyiv on Valentine’s Day, with a return ticket for mid-March. We were leaving as a precaution, though precaution hardly captures how agonising a decision it was. An accidental career Late March 2022, Vienna: I sit here on a glorious sunshiny spring morning in Stadtpark, one of Central Europe’s most picturesque parks, with birds chirping, fountains in full flow, couples promenading hand-in-hand, the distant strains of a busker adding a jazz soundtrack to the setting. Ah, the life of an English teacher abroad! ...

русский корабль, иди нахуй!  'I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.’  ‘I can’t even imagine what it’s like.’ These sentences, or a variation of them, have featured in most of the emails I’ve sent and received in the past month or so. As clichéd as it is, it has to be said because it’s so true. I truly can’t imagine what some of my friends are going through. I truly can’t imagine the unspeakable horrors happening right now. My grandmother used to tell me stories about Belfast being bombed by the Germans during World War II. She was a teenager at the time, and the tales she told me about fleeing to bomb shelters in the middle of the night and the bombs exploding around her and the house just across the road that got bombed were simultaneously fascinating yet terrifying. I couldn’t even imagine the reality. From afar, with the passage of time, it was so distant that I could barely comprehend how shocking it must have been. It seemed like more of an epic adventure. Spend...