My mum was forced to study what my granddad wanted her to study. My mum always wanted to be a doctor and my granddad decided that it was not good and that she should become an accountant. I think it was ‘privileged’ and it was an easy way to get a job and I think for my grandparent’s generation, security meant more than anything else.

My grandad was a driver for 40 years. He spent his whole life working as a driver. He started working as driver for Generals during the war and then he ended up in a prison because the car he was driving the General in, one of the wheels came off and killed someone.

He was a little bit of a dictator, he was of a very typical post-war mentality where people never got together from love, it was purely based on instinct, about reproduction and surviving and my grandparents bickered their whole life. But they managed to have a decent house and a decent life with a pension and stuff.

Going back to my childhood, I have had ‘three lives’. I had the ‘U.S.S.R. life’ — I was born during the U.S.S.R. — I had life in the independent Ukraine and I am British. I have tasted life in three different dimensions.

I had an amazing relationship with my grandfather. In a way we loved each other for the fact neither of us gave up their ideas. But we didn’t like each other for the fact we couldn’t accept each other, who we are, because we are very strong characters and he stuck to his rules and I stuck to mine. We had amazing fights over politics and religion but we we never put anger in it, we always put what we believe in. Our arguments were very intellectual with a lot of discussion. Going back to my childhood, I have had ‘three lives’. I had the ‘U.S.S.R. life’ — I was born during the U.S.S.R. — I had life in the independent Ukraine and I am British. So I can trace, I can sense — the same thing — I have tasted life in three different dimensions, while he has tasted life in one dimension.

I remember when I was a kid I had to do some physical work to help him: to preserve some potatoes for the winter, and I always wanted to innovate the process and he always stuck to the way he was taught by his grandfather. So obviously the method used to do that was from generation upon generation before him — and he believed in the functionality of it — it worked, so why do we have to change? At that time I was questioning everything.

His understanding of time and the world was very different, he was amazed by how life had changed in general but also he believed in safety, which was his main priority. I understand why because his father died when he was 7 and he was left with 7 siblings. So he was the eldest kid to look after all the others, people were reliant on him.