JOHNVAGABONDAGAIN

One year. In spite of his increasingly transparent delusions – the word ‘failings’ is far too gentle – Vladimir Putin has not been defeated and the war drags on. They said the Great War would be ‘over by Christmas’ after only a few months of fighting but it took four weary years with countless white crosses and the flower of Europe’s manhood lost to bring the madness to a close. When I was at school, we had a war museum containing artefacts pillaged from battlefields. I still recall seeing a German helmet from WW1 with a neat entrance hole where the wearer’s temple would have been and a gaping occipital exit. As the song says, when will they ever learn? A German language film loosely based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 bestseller ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ (in German, ‘nothing new in the West) captured the terror and futility as it tracked the progress of German volunteers in the last year of the war and won seven BAFTAs, including Best Film. It’s a chilling, difficult watch not...

Where I live, inflation is in double figures and is going to rise higher. People are doing all they can for Ukrainian refugees and Russian and Ukrainian can be frequently heard in the streets. Yes, the brutal invasion of Ukraine by the mad Tsar in Moscow is almost unilaterally to blame. Food and fuel prices are rising here and in a poor country this is not merely an inconvenience. It is a calamity and the reasons can be laid squarely at Moscow’s door. Yet the chill wind of famine is currently felt most keenly in the vast agricultural territories of Ukraine itself. A few weeks ago, a journalist spoke with a Ukrainian peasant - they still call the agricultural workers that in a place that is virtually a breadbasket for the rest of the world. He said: “In the old days, we had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are dying of hunger. In the old days, we fed the world. Now they have taken all we had away from us and we have nothing. In the old days, I would have bade you welcom...