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.

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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.