First-class air mail

Growing up as a rootless army brat in bases home and abroad, I would listen in appalled delight to my parents’ record of Tom Lehrer singing ‘Poisoning pigeons in the park’: ‘When they see us coming the birdies all try and hide/ but they still go for peanuts, when coated in cyanide.’ Now, I have lived in the same house for 20 years, determined to stay put, and every year a brace of feral pigeons join me by nesting under the eaves of my porch.

In Homing, Jon Day takes on the humble racing pigeon to ask just what home is, how we establish it, miss it and depart and return to it. He elevates this heroic bird to its rightful place in natural history and our history too, and celebrates its shared instinct with us for home.

Set principally in a London suburb in 2013, amid the housing crisis and Theresa May’s cold-shouldering of immigrants, the book is a moving biography of Day’s past and immediate relatives as he settles down from the itinerant freedom of bike couriering to start his own family and academic career.

His homing impulse begins with his partner: ‘I knew that wherever Natalya was, I wanted to make my home.’ But as an imminent father, he suffers an all too familiar moment of crisis and domestic doubt in B&Q. He decides to reawaken a childhood love of nursing birds and explore the world of pigeon racing — known as ‘the fancy’ among aficionados — to help re-seat his domestic psyche.

He has many fascinating accounts of how we’ve exploited these miraculous birds’ homing instincts in war and peace. Pigeons have bridged our communications from Roman times through to the 20th century. In the first world war, Major General Fowler said of them:‘When the battle rages and everything gives way, it is to the pigeon that we go for succour.