Winter Routines

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.

Photo set: Before the fall

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Half a dozen photographs that I took in Ukraine this summer - in Khersones (Crimea), Kyiv and Chernihiv.

Highland Games

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.

The Breath of a Thousand Strangers

Kyiv, January 2009

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.

King’s Cross and the Queen’s Neighbour

London, December 2008

I grew up in Sussex just an hour away from the capital, but the journey on the train was always so expensive that the only opportunities I had to experience life in the big city were when my parents would take me to watch sport. My Dad and I used to lose our voices singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” at the Twickenham rugby ‘Sevens’ each spring, and bring fleeces and flasks to watch cricket at Lord’s or the Oval every summer. My Mum took me to the Olympia horse show in the Christmas holidays. Until I was fifteen I must have thought that the city was just a collection of sports grounds.

Photo set: the people of Ukraine

A gallery of photographs of people – some are of friends and acquaintances, others are of strangers. Click on the thumbnails below to enlarge them.

London’s Cultural Collage

This photo, taken on Oxford Street in London just before Christmas, perfectly captures the mood of the city. Three symbols of British identity – fish and chips, a red London bus and tartan – are complemented by examples of the international faces, food and fashion that make life in the capital so wonderfully diverse.

The Night Train

The new people, places and situations that we encounter during our lives shape the way that we view the world. In late July 2008 I experienced all three at the same time, during an overnight train journey between Hungary and Ukraine in the middle of my vacation from the law firm in Kyiv where I had been working. The journey will stay in my mind for longer than the holiday itself.

The Night Train: photos

The Chechen family who I shared a train compartment with, on the way from Budapest to Kyiv.