on the border with Ukraine and I wonder if it’s snowing there. It’s hailing hard here, a ten-second whiteout with polystyrene balls filling up the guttering, mauling my nascent crabtree blossoms. I could run down to the gravel front yard and cover them with a dustsheet to protect the buds, it’s more than I can do about the tanks. Would that just be crazy, would the neighbours stare out from their casements thinking. who is this loon? But the hail thins and stops in a moment and I don’t break away from reading about the horrors and iniquities in the news. I feel obliged to know about them, some faded sense of duty as a member of the human race but maybe I should concentrate my efforts on the crabtrees and the five kilometer region of influence around my house, my local? And then I reason that I should apply the same care and curiosity to anywhere I go, no matter how far I range, local is wherever I am. I’m reading about a Russian now, Oleg in Cancer Ward freed from the clinic and gazing at the apricot tree blossom. He’s fictive, from fifty years back or more and the writer’s seen a different slice of world and life than I have, ever will. But the wonder still rings true and familiar when he stares at the blossoms. And I can imagine him running downstairs to cover his crabtrees in a hail storm. We’re all laced together by invisible threads we thinking things, over cracked continents and down the fluttering centuries.