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 mood. Political graffiti is smeared across the walls of an underground passageway near my office, a mark of Ukrainians' frustration at the repugnant choices available to them for the approaching general elections. Whether Yulia Tymoshenko or Viktor Yanukovich becomes president ... read more

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. ... read more

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 still in bed, jabbing weakly at the snooze button on my alarm clock. Five times a week (or four most weeks in spring, thanks to public holidays dished out by the Red Army and Russian ... read more

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 ... read more

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 was, I had missed the country’s eccentricity after two months at home. I had arrived back in Kyiv after two weeks travelling through Ukraine. On the way between Lviv and Luhansk provinces I had taken ... read more