November is Ukraine's most melancholic month. The temperature falls below freezing, and the orange and yellow leaves that make October so picturesque fall on to the street and are trodden into dirty puddles (the Ukrainian word for November, Listopad, means "fall of leaves"). The plain, snowless clouds feel low enough to touch. People discard their colourful autumn clothes and clamber into black and dark grey coats. A cold wind blows stern looks onto our faces - autumn forgotten, the country settles in for an attritional winter. It isn't just the weather that gnaws at the nation's mo [View Full Entry]

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Autumn in Ukraine is beautiful but lethargic. Instead of wrapping dull stories around my photos, I have updated the list I made in 2007 of all the places I have slept during my travels. I enjoyed reading it back to myself: life these days has too much work and not enough Tatar witchdoctors. Places where I have slept during my travels: *Prospekt Tolbukhina, Yaroslavl, Russia, with an old woman who cut my towel into pieces and once fed me cat food - 4 months. *Ana's friend Lena's flat in Nagornaya, south-west Moscow. *Ana's auntie Sveta's flat on [View Full Entry]

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A collection of photographs from Kyiv, Khersones and Chernihiv. To view them as a slideshow: click on the first photo to enlarge it, and then click on "slideshow" to see them in sequence. You can find more of my writing and photography on my journal, Short stories and photographs from across Europe. [View Full Entry]

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The Isle of Mull is an island in the Inner Hebrides, a few miles from the coast of western Scotland. On its northernmost point lies Tobermory, an adorable port town which is the setting for the BBC children’s program ‘Balamory’; at the very south of the island, generations of Scottish kings are buried at Iona Abbey. Between its heralded tips are forty square miles of raw nature: tranquil lochs, moody glens and rugged marshland that are dashing even under grey skies. My family has travelled to Mull since the 1960s. My grandparents made friends in Tobermory after a chance t [View Full Entry]

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There is much to enjoy about early mornings in Kyiv: the cool air and peaceful blue tint in the sky (or whimsical snow in winter); the purposeful stomp of expensive shoes on the street as its businesspeople make their way to work; the unflustered rhythms of the metro before it becomes crowded; the melodious whirr of the coffee machine in the kitchen in my office, churning out triple espressos to be sipped before the working day starts. Unfortunately - due to my body’s own unflustered rhythms - ninety-nine times out of a hundred while all this is going on I am [View Full Entry]

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Thinking of ways to spend my birthday, I remembered having read an article about the number 12 tram, whose route takes its passengers out of Kyiv and through a pine forest to a small town called Pushcha Voditsa. Exhausted by the city, desperate to explore somewhere beyond it, and intrigued by journey that the writer of the article described as “one of the most remarkable tram journeys in the world”, Ana and I set off with a picnic of bottled water and bars of chocolate toward the tram stop in the Podil district. We were leaving behind a hot summer day [View Full Entry]

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Pok - pok - pok - pok - pok - pok - pok! - the sounds drifting through the chestnut trees outside my new building from games of tennis on the clay courts nearby are a soft Saturday morning wake-up call. The new neighbourhood is a refined one: sometimes a red squirrel appears in the tree opposite our balcony, or a husband and wife step into the courtyard below and help their toddler to practice walking. More often than not the bells of the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra chime loudly; the place is a calm village in the centre of a thrusting city. [View Full Entry]

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In March I moved with Ana to Kyiv's Arsenal'na district, between Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) and the right bank of the river Dnieper. It is one of the city's most attractive areas, scattered with lush, sweet-smelling chestnut trees and punctuated by dozens of landmarks. It is home to the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra (The Kyiv Cave Monastery, completed in 1015), a guardian of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, behind which stands the Rodina - Mat' (Motherland) statue, her thick, silver arms and thick, silver sword thrusting defiantly - and symbolically - at the sky, on top of the Museum [View Full Entry]

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The smell in the corridor is a familiar mixture of boiled cabbage and cheap cigarettes. A brown carpet in the bedroom is fixed to one of the walls instead of the floor. In the bathroom half of the bathtub sits under a chimney and the lock on the toilet door is on the outside. The kitchen is decorated in eight shades of beige - a flat so infuriatingly fragile could only be Ukrainian. I was staying with Ana and her roommate Alisa, while I searched for a new job and a place of my own. As uncomfortable as the living situation [View Full Entry]

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Pitching up at the apartment in Lviv - which I had rented for Ana and me to spend three days in over New Year - gave me an improbable sense of déjà vu. As we entered the cosy flat on vulytsya Fedorova I felt as though I was not stepping into the home of a rotund lady called Marianna, but of my imagined thirty-five year old self. It was clean, light, and decorated in a comfortable style that, subconsciously, I had aspired to wrapping myself in ever since being punched and kicked out of a Stalin-era ghetto the year before. My [View Full Entry]

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