Sharik

 Tuesday, May 10th,  was the 130th anniversary of my father's birth. 
Or maybe not, because when he was born, in 1892, Russia was still using the Julian calendar which was (then)  twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar used now so all birhdays had to be shifted forward when the latter was adopted. 

I have very few photographs from my father's  childhood but among them is this one. On the back he has written: 
Sharik, a mongrel. Lifino 1902. (That was the village in Ukraine where my father was born.
My father would have been 10  then and already his brother was dead and his mother and sister departed for good. The dog is sitting on the lap of (I assume) my father's Scottish governess, later to become his wicked stepmother. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Sharik was the best thing in his life at the time. He was always very fond of dogs.

I looked the picture out when I read this morning about the desperate  journey across war-torn Ukraine made on foot by a man, Igor Pedin aged 61, and his dog Zhu-zhu aged 9, from bombed-out Mariupol in the south to the relative safety of Zaporizhzhia furthernorth. The dog looks very like Sharik. Maybe it is a Ukrainian type.
See here.

(Sharik means a small ball in Russian and is a common name for dogs.)