James Meek

In my horror and despair, in those first weeks, particularly when the systemic cruelty of the Russian military showed itself – not just towards civilians and the Ukrainian military, but towards its own troops – I was glad to see video of Russian hardware being destroyed. If it was not, it would kill more Ukrainians. I gradually remembered that inside the destroyed war machines were people.

The Quadrant is in what the Environment Agency defines as Flood Zone 3a, land with a high probability of flooding, though this doesn’t take sea defences into account. When construction began, the site was, on average, barely two metres above sea level, and four metres below the level the Haven rose to during the 2013 storm. I have to dwell for a bit on the weirdness of that last sentence. It has ‘sea level’ both as a constant and as a value that goes up and down all the time. Human life and property by the trillion dollarload hang on the millimetre margins of the concept of ‘sea level’, but a closer look makes a seemingly hard-edged measure complex and uncertain. It turns out we’re all flat earthers by instinct. If I think about the concept of sea level hard enough, I experience disorientation, almost motion sickness, as awareness grows that I’m not living on solid ground but on a sinking chunk of planetary crust, on the surface of a not-really-spherical spinning globe, at the mercy of the nearest star, two icecaps and a capricious moon that sloshes the oceans to and fro like a child rocking in an over-filled bath.

The success​ of the Normandy landings in June 1944 brightened the mood in London, but some people worried that Germany would lash out in revenge. One morning, on the Isle of Dogs, William Regan heard a small plane fly over and get shot down, causing a surprisingly large explosion. The same thing happened to another plane, and another. ‘I said to Alf that the gunners were on form, three...

On my way to the Black Sea I spent the afternoon in Kyiv. After downloading the national air-raid warning app I sat in a café. My phone went off at full volume a few seconds before the actual sirens did. I took my cue from the locals: rather than running for shelter, I turned the sound down, embarrassed. Kyivans continued to whizz past on electric scooters. At the far end of the café terrace, a photographer and a model carried on their fashion shoot. Kyiv hadn’t been attacked for weeks, but a fortnight later, it was. My train from Poland to Kyiv had passed through an Arcadian landscape of downs, meadows, ponds and spinneys. We stopped at Vinnytsia. Twenty minutes later, I was in the buffet when somebody looked up wide-eyed from their phone. Just after the train left Vinnytsia, Russia had dropped three missiles on the city, killing 25 people, including three children, and injuring more than two hundred.