A MATTER OF DISTANCE

I woke up yesterday, to the sound of rain spattering on the window. I’d left the curtains open, a habit of mine recently, to try to wake up with the daylight. Outside, beyond the sweeping rain, the trees in the park were rocking back and forth in the wind. Grey clouds flew by.

“Russia launches invasion of Ukraine” displayed the BBC headline. I felt my heart sink as though it were dropping a thousand times. Though it had been expected, the reality was a sucker punch.

For what seemed like the longest time I wondered if I was ill. I lay there, blinking at the ceiling, listening to the rain. My stomach churned unhappily and my muscles felt heavy; iron legs and arms weighing down into the mattress. It was pure sadness, I suppose.

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The first work call of the morning was similarly heavy. I work with developers and testers in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and even across the border in Russia. Many of them were missing today - relocating we were told - to safer havens. Their Teams status was set to an ominous ‘Away’.

Not all were absent though. One person, Eugeny, even told us how a bomb had fallen on a house just 500 metres up the road. Others talked about how they’d been woken in the early hours, or could hear distant thundering as Russian tanks rolled in. These are real people, with real lives, both sides of the border.

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Day 2. The morning meeting was heavy again. Many of my colleagues are struggling to sleep, and even the managers in the UK looked grey-faced and strained today. Kristina (in Chernihiv) was determined to focus on work; Alexander (camera off) talked about how he’d like to relocate to Georgia.

“I had visit from police,” said someone just over the Russian border. The police had told him that protesting against the government was ‘treason’ and he could go to jail. He told us how he doesn’t want anything to do with the government anymore. Some of the UK people were wide-eyed at the camera. Me too.

I get it, I think. The birds chirping in the hedgerows and the clouds falling through the lazy skies of England in the summer of 1939. Life went on here, just as it always had - sure there would have been reports of the brownshirts and localised violence in distant parts of Germany, troops marching into Poland, dark clouds over Europe. What though, would that have to do with us? 

Far away, foreigners were being turfed out of their homes. What difference does it make to afternoon tea in the garden? And bombs go off all the time, don’t they, in Baghdad, in Afghanistan, in Syria and Yemen and now in Ukraine. It would be so easy to stay disconnected, as though it were happening in a story. As if Putin were a made-up villain: cartoonised, angular with exclamation marks in his speech-bubbles, where you could just close the book tight, and he couldn’t get you.

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It was hard to get up this morning too. Second day in a row. I should have been praying, perhaps scouring the news for fresh information, but once again all I could do was stare blankly at the ceiling. Outside, the trees still swayed, and yesterday’s rain had been replaced with golden morning sunshine. There was no rumbling of tanks nor stomping of boots outside. No planes growled overhead, no distant thuds echoed in the valley.

I’m aware though that peace like that is only ever a matter of distance. I blinked, threw back the duvet and found a little space to pray for my colleagues.