Uprooted

We met local photographer Philip Clarke standing in the road with his tripod, taking pictures of an oak felled by the recent storms. He explained that he was collecting images for an upcoming collaborative exhibition with the theme Rootless/Uprooted.

Would that include refugees? I asked. (Wales has a substantial number who have put down roots here in recent years.) No - but we talked about Ukraine, naturally. 

Philip mentioned that one of the very last survivors of the Holodomor (the genocidal famine of 1930/31 in which millions of Ukrainians starved to death after food supplies were deliberately withheld by Stalin) had died in a nearby village a couple of years ago and that as a child he, like others,  had resorted to eating grass - and worse. It was a chilling reminder of how the  present situation is rooted in the past.

Just to make it clear: my father was Ukrainian by birth, Russian by nationality - just as I am Welsh by birth, British by nationality.
All vestiges of his family connections were swept away in the Russian revolution of 1917 and thereafter he was a stateless person.