Many kids dream of being a pilot; few get to act out their fantasy in real aircrafts. Among those few is Katie Melua. “There are videos of me at six or seven years old, laughing as I climb into old Soviet planes.” Melua smiles, recalling the abandoned airport near her grandma’s house in Tbilisi, Georgia – a land she fled with her family aged nine, in the aftermath of the civil war.
The Meluas settled in Belfast, then rife with its own Troubles. Yet the family felt like they’d “won the lottery”. The Georgian civil war, stoked by Russia, had ravaged their home country in ways not dissimilar to today’s situation in Ukraine.
