James Meek

The Quadrant is in what the Environment Agency defines as Flood Zone 3a, land with a high probability of flooding, though this doesn’t take sea defences into account. When construction began, the site was, on average, barely two metres above sea level, and four metres below the level the Haven rose to during the 2013 storm. I have to dwell for a bit on the weirdness of that last sentence. It has ‘sea level’ both as a constant and as a value that goes up and down all the time. Human life and property by the trillion dollarload hang on the millimetre margins of the concept of ‘sea level’, but a closer look makes a seemingly hard-edged measure complex and uncertain. It turns out we’re all flat earthers by instinct. If I think about the concept of sea level hard enough, I experience disorientation, almost motion sickness, as awareness grows that I’m not living on solid ground but on a sinking chunk of planetary crust, on the surface of a not-really-spherical spinning globe, at the mercy of the nearest star, two icecaps and a capricious moon that sloshes the oceans to and fro like a child rocking in an over-filled bath.

The success​ of the Normandy landings in June 1944 brightened the mood in London, but some people worried that Germany would lash out in revenge. One morning, on the Isle of Dogs, William Regan heard a small plane fly over and get shot down, causing a surprisingly large explosion. The same thing happened to another plane, and another. ‘I said to Alf that the gunners were on form, three...

On my way to the Black Sea I spent the afternoon in Kyiv. After downloading the national air-raid warning app I sat in a café. My phone went off at full volume a few seconds before the actual sirens did. I took my cue from the locals: rather than running for shelter, I turned the sound down, embarrassed. Kyivans continued to whizz past on electric scooters. At the far end of the café terrace, a photographer and a model carried on their fashion shoot. Kyiv hadn’t been attacked for weeks, but a fortnight later, it was. My train from Poland to Kyiv had passed through an Arcadian landscape of downs, meadows, ponds and spinneys. We stopped at Vinnytsia. Twenty minutes later, I was in the buffet when somebody looked up wide-eyed from their phone. Just after the train left Vinnytsia, Russia had dropped three missiles on the city, killing 25 people, including three children, and injuring more than two hundred.

Liberal opinion in North America and Western Europe has tended to be gung-ho about pro-democracy protesters storming ruling institutions in other countries, notably Ukraine in 2014. But it’s one thing to imagine, as Barbara Walter encourages her readers to do, the gradual spread of white supremacist, anti-government terrorism across America against a democratic framework, until one day the progressive left, and the people of colour she suggests are likely to be targets of violence, arm and organise for self-protection. It’s another to wake up one morning and find that without any bloodshed or violence, without any seeming change in the smooth running of traffic signals and ATMs and supermarkets, without, even, an immediate wave of arrests or a clampdown on free speech, your country is run by somebody who took power illegally. Something must be done! But what, apart from venting on social media? And by whom? Me?

It’s striking how many times, in the past few months, Putin has been accused of being behind the transport of migrants from the Middle East to the borders of the EU through Belarus, and, separately, of being about to invade Ukraine, and, separately, of manipulating gas supplies to Europe; it’s also striking how few times the commentators consider what it would mean for all these accusations to be true. It’s quite possible they are, but this implies a greater degree of uncertainty and contradiction within the Kremlin than we’ve been comfortable imagining in the late Putin era. Let’s suppose Putin did help enable, or green-lighted, the cruel wheeze by Lukashenko to lure migrants to Belarus with the promise of transit over the border to Poland. Perhaps the cash-strapped, sanctioned Lukashenko had hopes of getting leverage over Berlin, but what would have been in it for Russia? If Putin and Lukashenko meant to turn the peoples of the EU against their leaders, it was a weak as well as a vicious way to go about it.