Balls to Bureaucracy.

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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.

The flat is cosy, too. Creaky chairs and a table sit in the narrow, mint green kitchen. It has a wide windowsill, on which I spent sleepless spring nights reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' and Rudyard Kipling's 'Kim'. The living room has new cupboards along one wall and two old sofas along another. The bathroom is about the same size as the coat closet. All rooms have Russian Orthodox icons above their doors.

After a nomadic winter and spring, staying in the same district for weeks on end sacrificed the adrenaline that exploring a city brings for a feeling of belonging. It had been a whole year since I had last felt at home in Ukraine; the routine of rushing home to catch Kadety or Schastlivy Vmeste can do wonderful things to a tired mind. Watching eye-watering performances on Ukrayina Mae Talant (Ukraine’s Got Talent) stirred feelings of pride as well as awe, as gymnasts both