7 days in Ukraine, June 2025

On my 6am flight to Krakow there are two huge stag parties. Both Stags are wearing tiny pink lycra cheerleading dresses saying ‘Beer Leader’ on the front. I hear one stag, who is wearing shorts under his skirt, say to his friend, after seeing the other stag who is not wearing shorts, ‘should I take my shorts off, d’you think? or just pull them up a bit?’

The  journey to Lviv is a long straight road. Our driver is talking a lot to the others and I can’t understand, but I notice her right hand is trembling on the steering wheel. 

We wait for about an hour to cross the border. It’s hot. Brand new military vehicles thunder past. Huge, sexy, repulsive. People making disgusting money from this, salivating, somebody's bank balance skyrocketing.

And then we arrive in Lviv and it’s the same as the last times - the weeks of mental preparation for the reality of sirens and drones and fear has left no space in my imagination for the stunning beauty and vibrancy of this city and its people. 

****

Guess who skids back on stage just hours before we are due to leave for Dnipro? You got it. Crocodile. This time, ready for their Solo, wearing a full sequin onesie, snazzy bow tie and top hat. I recoil but they hold me in their gaze and begin to shimmy. It’s deeply unnerving. I look away, they slide back into view. I cross my legs and arms, scanning for Pink Fluffy. 

The shimmy transforms into a Samba of Sirens, a slow, wave-like movement that is uncanny and repulsive. Bile rises in my belly and I get up to leave. Crocodile pins me to my seat with his cold stare and the tempo picks up - the paso doble drone attack is both horrific and nimble. This isn’t helping my nausea. Where is Pink Fluffy?

I can only see sequins and teeth as the spray of saliva hits my face, a frenzied, dazzling dervish of rockets and shells and fire. My breath quickens. I close my eyes and call out for Pink Fluffy but my voice is drowned out by singing…a kind of Phil Collins number, but with more teeth. My pupils dilate, my stomach drops. You can’t expect me to sit here and listen to this? I turn my back.

Crocodile leaps into the air with a double salto and lands squarely in front of me without dropping a single note. He tips his hat with glee, tail slapping the floor. He is working hard. No, not sweating…because don’t be ridiculous, crocodiles don’t sweat…but salivating, breath rasping, eyes shining with need. It’s clear that they won’t stop, they will not stop until I pay attention. 

I wake up to Igor poking his head around the door
‘coffee?!!’
Ye..
‘Dnipro was heavily bombarded last night, second night in a row’
Oh…
Jan said he witnessed a kind of Star Wars in the sky as he walked to his car. We look at Telegram and see the extent of it - 27 civilians injured, 3 dead, apartment windows smashed... the list of rockets, drones, shells launched at the city goes on and on and on.

I desperately don’t want to look at this ridiculous, horrific crocodile, so I cover my face, but the change of rhythm intrigues me. I peek. Oh God. They’ve started a whole new sequence, this time a kind of avant garde semaphore routine. Are those..bells?...are they wearing bells on their ankles?!


Wait, WHAT? Jan was on his way to his CAR?? During the siren?!


Somehow I am on my feet, and Crocodile and I are prancing together in unison. We Macarena, we Rumba, we Cha Cha Cha, we attempt the Charleston but some things are best left to the experts.


Another message arrives from Tanya in Kharkiv, ‘we are living here. Everything will be fine’ followed by another, ‘Thank you for coming. I don’t know why are you putting your psyche at such risk, but respect’
Huh
Nothing like a well timed question.


And just as suddenly as we started our dance, we stop. Right in the centre of the stage. Crocodile’s little arms dangling at their sides. Sequins glittering in the spotlight, top hat askew. Ankle bells stilled.

We stay like that for some time, just looking at one another, catching our breath.


Our conversation spirals inward, from logic, through obligation, guilt, pride, vanity, empathy, stumbling over our inner adrenaline junkies and crashing down into shame. We keep going through hope, disappointment and confusion, spiralling inwards and inwards until suddenly it is clear. We are not going to Dnipro.

We are not going to Dnipro because the worst case scenario isn’t death, it is sitting in a bomb shelter for six days, scared shitless, feeling that our trip has been meaningless because we can’t work. Our psyches aren’t up to that.

Pink Fluffy is pulling me there to meet this need with all their might, but Jan and the other clowns also have big hearts, hearts with the capacity to work through sirens, through it all. We hear that this massive bombardment isn’t bad relative to what is expected in the coming days. Their courage would be our stupidity. We are so fortunate to have a choice.

Saying this no, accepting this huge failure and the disappointment it will cause is painful and deeply humbling. We deal with it the only way we know how.

After a pause, Igor looks over at me;

‘So we will clown in the street here tonight?’

And the dance of Crocodile and Pink Fluffy continues.

****

The melody of a violin catches our ears and pulls us softly into the street. A mother sits on the statue wall, arms tightly crossed over her body. Robin’s gesture for her to join our dance only tightens this immovable knot. Nothing to lose, I hop in front of her, cross my arms and wait. Her eyes brighten slightly. I wiggle my fingers, she turns to her daughter, ‘should I?’ and then turns back and wiggles hers with a smile. We wiggle and prize apart the knotted rope of our arms until we are suspended, hearts open to the world and each other for one tender moment. I drop my hands down into hers, she bows her head, I bow mine. I look up and her eyes sparkle with tears.
The fountain that we washed our hot feet in earlier is a minefield, water jets set to explode at any moment. We are cats in a bathtub, frozen with fear, then berserk with panic. Later we are twirling and spinning, splashing golden sunlight, dancing joy and abandon. My awareness expands to include all of it - there is nothing that separates me from Igor from the pigeons flying overhead, from the audience, from the setting sun. 

In the first orphanage it feels as if we’ve all known one another forever. The games bubble with laughter and flow with ease. We have to remind everyone to call us Maybee and Robin instead of Mama and Papa. In the second, aggression seems the only way the children know to say ‘don’t go’. One moment of calm, when I am crying because I stepped in a puddle, and a small group mirror Robin, gently soothing me and one boy sings a lullaby. 

We climb out of the window so they don’t see us out of costume. On the street, Igor gets stopped by an undercover police officer asking to see his passport, checking he is not escaping the Draft.

Sirens last night. We look at Telegram. The map of Ukraine is covered with different coloured arrows pointing to Kyiv and Dnipro. The straight yellow ones are ballistic rockets. We sleep in the bathroom squeezed between the washing machine and the bathtub, thinking of our friends, who can hear the arrows landing on education centres, industrial estates, maternity wards.

In hospital, a boy separates and reunites us over and over again, demands we do push ups and laps of the corridor until he decides enough is enough. He marches over with his hands in a Karate position and annihilates us in slow motion. With one blow he chops my head clean off and rips Robin's body in two.

A huge field of graves and flags and empty plots waiting to be filled. A mother tending her son's grave starts to talk and there isn’t a moment’s pause where I can say that I don’t speak Ukrainian. She talks and talks, looks at the sky, looks at the portrait of her son (the spitting image of her own face) and holds mine and Igors hands warmly, smiling, talking, talking, talking. Somehow it is clear that she is talking about love, nothing but love.

At Unbroken Mothers, we are greeted by a nun, the first I have ever met. She behaves and seems exactly like all the kind nuns of my imagination.

One small girl bursts with excitement as soon as she sees us then squeezes her baby brother around the waist and lifts him up shouting ‘MINE!’. It reminds me of how I used to carry my cat, under the armpits, smooshing my face into his head, no mercy. I pick up Robin and squeeze. She squeals in a kind of frenzied delight. It is only after a couple of minutes of this intense interaction that we realise the room we are in is a vacuum of ice cold grief. Everyone else is silent and non-responsive, hearts tightly tucked away inside. The thought, ‘accept that this isn’t working and might never work’. We drop everything and let them see us, lost. Something imperceptible shifts, and we begin gently spinning silk into the void. Robin taps my hand and it drifts forward, lightness sensing lightness, a hope seeking missile. He taps again and we continue like this, quietly, gently in silence until my hand lands on the wall above the shoulder of a teenager. They look and smile. They help to blow my hand away from the wall, and follow us outside.

As I walk around the military cemetery, my mind tries to bring these boys, sons, brothers, dads, beloveds back to life, back where they belong. I recognise so many of them, somehow. A mother is trying to get her young son to pose next to a portrait of his dad for a photo. He must have been born around the time the war started.

****
Ivanna explains that the soldiers here are amputees and are traumatised. No loud noises, no sudden moves. A pause. We say soldiers. They are not soldiers. They are simply civilians who had to take up arms. This is a state hospital that is well resourced in terms of rehab equipment, but there are no arts activities - the focus is on recovery through physio and therapy. Body and mind covered, then, but not spirit.

Seconds after entering, a young man shakes our hands brightly and within minutes I know he is half Ukrainian half Peruvian, 25 years old, a sniper. I know he was the only survivor in his battalion of the shelling that sliced his left leg clean off. I know he saw the explosion that killed his little brother, that he hoped Bogdan had survived until he saw his arm, lying on its own, his head obliterated. I know he was a paediatrician in Peru. We walk into our changing room and I have the feeling my face is grey. 

It feels like our noses will be a barrier to connection rather than a bridge, so we don’t wear them. 

A young man lying on his back in physio. Robin does the same massage on the man’s shoulder as the therapist is doing on his upper thigh. Laughing, he says more people would come to physio if the service was always like this.

I am stuck on a physioball. I call out for help. A man exercising his shoulder says ‘sorry! Can’t help! I don’t have an arm’ as he looks down in a burst of laughter. I don’t take no for an answer, gesturing to his other arm. He pulls me to my feet, and we are laughing, really laughing, and there is no distance between us. My hero.

A Table Tennis match between Robin and Max. Maybee and an older man sit on the sidelines - Boss Coach and Assistant Coach, ‘Ras Ras Ras!’. Robin does his best but cannot ‘Ras Ras Ras’ like Max can. 

In the lunch hall we are eager waiters, delivering soup to new friends. These connections ripple around the hall. We feel others watching and smiling, not ready to participate, receiving our innocence and lightness gladly. Others don’t look up at all. 

Two men in uniform stand opposite each other in the corridor. We begin to weave their names together, singing Vova-Andrea-Andrea-Vova in harmony, our voices forming an embroidery, a vyshyvanka, a celebration of their bond. They join and we dance, twirling under their arms.

Working here is the most remarkable and stunning reminder that we are not our bodies, we are not our trauma, we are not the stories we tell about ourselves.

****
We finally have a call with Jan - our first chance to talk since we cancelled our plans to go to Dnipro. He is beautifully honest about his heartbreak. I notice myself bracing so I breathe, soften, trust myself to receive whatever needs to be shared and when we hang up I sob deep, hot, tears until I am laughing in awe and wonder at the capacity of the human heart.

Before our hospital shift Igor is horrified when he accidentally steps on a slug. We get hysterical imagining the slug children by the side of the road, looking on in shock, whispering ‘Papa?!’ Tears of laughter stream down my face. So dark, so wrong, so necessary. 

In an attempt to salvage something of our cancelled workshop we invite Lviv clowns to join us for 2 hospital shifts. Seven clowns are sitting in the hospital cafe in full costume with noses on. It is clear straight away that we have different ways of working. Igor and I clown with ‘empty pockets’ - no props, no routines, no plan, no discussion about who is high or low status. This requires us to become expertly attuned first to ourselves, then to one another, then to our environment and the people in it so that we can notice and respond authentically to what is there, to what is real, and transform that into whatever it might need to be. This is a new way of working for this group so divide we divide time between observations, practice for those who want to give it a go, and feedback.

…slippers singing opera to one another, a light switch that controls Mr Robins ‘boobopbedeebop’ song, an attempt to steal a pair of giant white crocs…

We just saw a young man having his papers checked by two men in army fatigues. He is looking me right in the eye as we drive past, unblinking, white as a ghost. The next moment he is put into the back of a car. When we get out I realise our van has black-out windows. Maybe he was looking into his own eyes then, a final goodbye to civilian life.

…a squeaky door that makes Dr Maybee cry, a teenage dance battle, repeated resuscitations of Oscar the Parrot by a dad, ‘Mama Rosa’ the ward clerk, a Chicky Chicky Boa Bats orchestra…

I’ve eaten nothing but cheese cakes, dumplings and pizza since we arrived. During last night's pizza, Ivanna explains why it’s important to go into a shelter when there is a siren. This explanation involves a detailed description of all the different types of rocket and their impact, including the impact of ricocheting defence bullets. I think, you are a 35 year old film producer, you shouldn’t know any of this.

…an epic thumb war that Maybee looses 3-0, Princess Victoria our New Boss, copying a nurse as he stands in front of us, transforms into an aeroplane and runs around the corridor three times the morning after a Khinjal Rocket is launched towards Kyiv and intercepted…

The slug story gets more elaborate. Some of the slug family have decided to get shells, just as a precaution. It’s a shocking betrayal, an irreparable rift. Granny slug falls asleep in shock. 

Stomach-sore with laughter and deliriously tired, we sleep too, ready to go home tomorrow.

When we arrive back at Krakow airport after a seven hour wait at the border it is impossible to understand that we were here only 7 days ago. I see myself getting into the car, see the driver with trembling hands, remember wondering if I would come back with trembling hands. My hands aren’t trembling, but my heart is, a little.

My family wants to hear that ‘I’m Okay’. And I am Okay, but it is too bland a word, too numb, too neutral. I feel as though all the cells are reconfiguring in my body, having understood something new about humanity’s capacity for suffering, survival and love. It’s not a comfortable sensation and it’s impossible to name.
​
The human experience is defined by an endless tide of polarities - day and night, fear and love, yes and no, sublime and ridiculous. The clown exists in that imperceptible moment where the tide turns, where inhale becomes exhale. Clowning, meeting the world with our open hearts, requires us to embrace both the yes and the no as necessary, beautiful, inevitable, inseparable. I have been called to that lesson over and over again this week and I have been left awestruck and devastated by the immense and staggering capacity of the human spirit. 

some reflections in the days leading up to our trip to Dnipro

​I realise I am avoiding talking to my parents about the trip. I know there is nothing I can say that will stop them from worrying.

****

Hearts & Minds are doing a new project in high schools, in the additional support for learning units. In our first session we went into an English class and when faced with questions about why we are Clowndoctors, we assumed it must be an exam. I got stressed, snapped my pencil, ate my exam paper in a panic and fell off my chair. We didn’t manage to answer even one question, but they gave us A+++++++++++ so it worked out okay in the end.

****

I noticed myself tidying today. I remembered my granny telling me how important it is to wear clean knickers in case you die suddenly, how she cleaned her house so carefully before she went into hospital for the last time. It was comforting to imagine that she knew she might die, that she was ready. This is not on a suicide mission, I am not expecting to die. I fully intend to come home healthy and wholehearted. But to be sure, when I die, it will be with a heart full of love and gratitude and joy. Or that’s the intention anyway.

****

On the beach, I’m enjoying the feeling of knowing that there is a stone waiting for me. I take a breath and look down and there it is - a flat, tear shaped pebble. Love at first sight.

Kate shared an exercise - to use our stone to ground ourselves in our bodily experience and then experiment with sending ourselves out into the environment - into the movement of a tree, a bird soaring overhead. To allow our cells to feel the sensation of flight.

It reminded of me our work in hospitals - how if we have make a meaningful connection with a child lying in a hospital bed, and they see us dancing or stretching, their mirror neurones mean that they can experience those bodily sensations as if they were their own. I’ve explained this badly, but it’s a thing.

Later, I was rolling around on a beach (highly recommend Kate’s work if you like the sound of that!), and came to a stop - I looked down and saw the tear shaped stone - it must have fallen out of my pocket. I put it back, feelings of loss and relief crashing into one another. Later, I opened my other pocket and found the first tear shaped stone. I’m stunned and not at all surprised.

I put them side by side, and felt me and Igor, each other’s anchor, fully grounded and simultaneously soaring in the sky, stretching our wings as wide and far as we possibly can, hearts open and….let’s be honest…probably in a fit of giggles.

****

We have a call with Jan. He describes Dnipro as ‘normal’. The part of a horror movie before the monster arrives. He describes drones passing over head in the evenings low enough that you feel they will brush the top of your head. He describes our journey to the surrounding villages, and the check points and tanks and mine fields that we will pass. Jan’s normal is not our normal. Soaring in the sky? It is a reality check.

****

Another visit to the high school. The last two visits, one boy has hidden in a den in the corner of the class for the whole session. The teacher says he really struggles with connection. This week, he found a tiny pink fluffy ball and poked it through the gap in the chair. I went over, ‘Wow! A pink Fluffy!’ I tried to meet it - gesturing with my hand, gently. It was hard to tell what he was responding to. I moved my hand closer, palm up. Pink fluffy moved towards it and then suddenly a tiny green crocodile enters, Stage Right. My hand retreats. The crocodile exits. I move closer again, pink fluffy lets me stroke his soft little head and then suddenly the crocodile arrives, my hand leaps back. The boy has managed to create a non-verbal ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ - we are building a language.

I bring out my harmonica and play a note - Pink Fluffy responds immediately, and Crocodile skids back onto the scene. I play a little tune and they dance, in perfect harmony. I speed up, slow down, checking that we are all together. I reach a crescendo, they are dancing in a frenzy and then we stop, in sync. They take a solemn bow and there is applause coming from behind me - a sceptical classroom assistant has been watching the whole thing.

I am delighted and call over a classmate.

Andrew! Hey! Have you ever seen a Pink Fluffy dancing with a Crocodile before?!!
Err, no
Want to?
I guess so?

He sits and the show strikes up again. Again they dance and take a bow and we applause. I invite over another student, and then another until we are ten people watching the tiny show, shouting ‘Bravo!! Encore!!’

At the end of the class, the teacher passes me a note. There is a stick drawing of a person, next to it an outline of Pink Fluffy and under it, ‘Is you friend?’

My heart just about burst.

How profound it is to recognise a need for connection, ask for it to be met, have it be met, and be able to receive the offering fully. And how complicated that is for so many of us. 

So I’m thinking about the moment we hugged Jan goodbye during our last visit and he said ‘next time come to Dnipro’ and how that need landed like a pilot light in our hearts and stayed there, gently flickering, waiting patiently, until we were ready give it the fuel of our attention and commitment.

****

Our last call before we fly, this time with Jan and the film crew who will accompany us (Madara, Valdes and Ivanna as well as Kristele who will support us from Latvia). We discuss logistics - where to pick up helmets and bullet proof vests - and I am having an out of body experience wondering how my life has delivered me to this moment, sitting in a cafe in Glasgow, talking seriously about wearing a bullet proof vest, driving through check points. And then Jan starts speaking quietly - about the villages we will visit, how isolated they are, how the war effects them. He talks about the need for human connection, and how much of a huge difference it makes, 'bringing humanity to these places'. How he has been answering this need from the very beginning of the war without doubt or hesitation, driving 100kms a week to deliver humanitarian aid and clowning missions.

And I recognise in Jan my conversations with Igor about why we are making this trip, and see in my minds eye these concentric circles of love, this ripple effect of human connection expanding out, all the way from those villages, through Jan, through us, the film crew, through our friends offering us supervision and support, our parents and families, through Pink Fluffy & crocodile and through everyone in between and beyond.

I feel we are ready to meet the world as it is - Pink Fluffy & Crocodile, the Yes and the No, the beauty and the horror, hearts wide open.