We must not get used to war dead

IT’S EXTRAORDINARY how quickly we adapt to the unthinkable. And we have had quite a lot to re-frame as “normal’ in recent years. Take the pandemic. How rapidly lockdown became simply the way things were.

Shops closed? Nothing odd about it. Not allowed to visit friends? That’s fine too.

The invasion of Ukraine was a terrible shock and it was only a couple of months ago. But already it seems ordinary and – shaming though it is to say this – something one can park at the back of one’s mind.

Maybe it’s a kind of instinctive survival strategy, this ability to not think about things you can’t do anything about.

The sight of bombed apartment buildings is now a familiar sight in any news programme. Even the Ukrainians who continue to live in these destroyed cities seem to have found a sort of normality, a way of getting through the day.