Ukraine, winter in Kiev

Ukraine... I have loved our explorations of West Ukraine but now I am in Kiev. It is winter. The temperature drops to - 18 and the streets are inches deep in ice. I do not venture out alone. I clutch my companion with one hand and pick at the ice with my walking pole - not stick: poles are for active walkers, sticks are for the bent elderly seen as such on road signs in UK.

Basically, I don't want to be here. Post-communist living has lost its charm - if it ever had any. What it had in the 1990s was hope that things would improve. Now, for all except the nouveau-riche and the mafia,who, by all accounts control this city, it spells despair.

I stay indoors and read. And write. That at least. The market cheers me up with plump country women selling chickens and cheese. But, beware, they cheat! No health and safety here. Stray dogs sniff wooden counters where the butcher hacks away at whole sides of meat.

Ukraine. I first heard the name when I was nineteen. It was in a poem by Paul Celan, a lament for his mother murdered in the Holocaust.

Dandelion, so green the Ukraine - my fair haired mother has not come home...

But young women stab the ice with impossibly high stiletto heels