Jon Day: ‘I hate the idea of going places.’

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What were your beginnings as a writer? Were you always writing and who or what gave you the impetus to start? 

I was always writing. I mean, before that, I was always reading. I’m not unique, to make the observation that all writers are readers first and primarily, and I remain perhaps more of a reader than a writer, but I was always reading. I always had inklings or ambitions buried very deep that I could never admit to, even to myself, that perhaps one day I could write.

I did English as an undergraduate degree, and then I didn’t really know what to do with myself. After university, I became a bicycle courier, which is a job that I really loved, and it gave me a lot of time to read, and I read a lot of books about London. It made me think about what it meant to inhabit the city in this slightly parasitic way, where you were skimming a living off capitalism. It’s quite a brutal job, but it was also freeing in some respects, although not in others. I thought this may be a subject to write about, but at that stage, I had no idea what it meant to write. I went back to university and did a masters in twentieth-century English literature, which was stimulating and interesting and exciting and very cerebral. But I missed the bodiliness of cycle couriering. I went back to do that for a year afterwards. I began to write little things for online magazines and blogs, I thought more about the subject of writing a book, which was very nascent, about being a bicycle courier.

I went back to university to do a PhD on a very abstract literary theoretical subject. I did that for three years, and again, slightly lost sight of cycling in that period, but it was also a time in which I begin to write publicly. I wrote a letter to the London Review of Books. This was a magazine which I’d read, and revered, all my adult and intellectual life. They had a piece written by a postman, talking about how hard it was to be postman. I wrote a letter to them saying, ‘Sure it’s hard to be a postman, but it’s really hard to be a cycle courier.’ They put it up on their blog. So, I wrote back to them and said I could write more, and they were very generous and responsive.

Great things to learn as a writer: how to meet a deadline, how to be edited, how not to be precious about your prose.

My first editor there, Thomas Jones, who still edits the blog, taught me a lot about writing and pitching. It felt very fortuitous, and I learned a lot, but I was also quite spoiled, because the editing at the LRB is extraordinarily attentive. After that, I spent a few years writing very regularly, reviewing. I think that’s good discipline. Great things to learn as a writer: how to meet a deadline, how to be edited, how not to be precious about your prose. It was then I committed to writing a book, thanks to my friend Jacques Testard. Jacques commissioned my first book, which gave me a different kind of deadline, a book deadline. Once I’d finished my PhD, I got back on the bike and then the courier job felt much more like research.

The way you describe a bike courier is very similar to how one might describe a pigeon.  

There is a kind of synergy between the strange subculture of pigeon fanciers and of couriers. Homing, my second book, is about the idea of home and pigeon fancying. I like these little secret worlds, especially in London. I grew up in London, but I never knew it until I’d cycled all over it or flown over it, via my pigeons.

Most people might get a dog or cat if they were keen for an animal companion. Why did you decide to raise creatures that defy domestication? 

I was really interested in their in-betweenness, that they weren’t quite pets, and they weren’t quite wild either, because they live alongside us. Pigeons are a much-hated bird by many city dwellers, but I think they’re fascinating and beautiful creatures.

Arguably in 2024, the pigeon is making a comeback. Artist Iván Argote has erected an 18-foot statue of a Pigeon on New York City’s High Line. In 2022, J. W. Anderson unveiled the viral Pigeon Clutch. Do you think the rebranding of the pigeon reflects a wider social trend?  

I also saw that the Museum of London have rebranded with a pigeon. I don’t think they’ll ever come back entirely. When I wrote Homing, a lot of people said, ‘Oh, I like doves, but I hate pigeons.’ Doves have this reputation of being beautiful, clean, loving and symbols of eternal faithfulness. Part of the aim of the book was to point out that pigeons and doves are the same species: doves are just another breed of columba livia, the species that both feral and urban pigeons belong to. But doves are the most photogenic, or have the best PR.

That’s what your book unveils. A big marketing strategy to demonise a bird. 

There was a time in the UK when pigeons weren’t really thought of in this way. They were heroes in the post-war years. I talk a lot about the history of pigeon racing in the book. In the 50s and 60s, it was the most popular sport by participation in Britain. The pigeon’s reputation nowadays is that they are disease ridden or smelly or unhygienic. It’s a recent-ish change, probably in the last fifty years. Maybe in my lifetime, they’ve become the ‘rats with wings’ which we know them as today, which is unfair, both to pigeons and to rats, who are equally fascinating creatures.

Mary Poppins urged us to feed the birds in 1964, and in 1994 Blur’s song ‘Parklife’, dubbed a working-class anthem, celebrated both the ‘dirty pigeons’ and the ‘people’. Do you think the ‘yassification’ of the common pigeon reflects a trend for reclaiming that which has previously been the victim of snobbery?  

In both those examples pigeons aren’t being made out to be beautiful creatures. They’re being celebrated as underdogs. I haven’t seen the sculpture you mentioned on the New York High line, but I’m sure it plays up the cocky urban-ness of the bird. One of the reasons pigeons thrive in cities is because cities mimic their natural environment. They are cliff nesting birds in nature. Columba livia: the rock dove. And in fact, lots of their bodily evolutionary changes reflect this environment. They’re the only species of bird that can take off vertically. If you see a pigeon in motion, it’s evolved to fly out and up from rocky outcrops, where there might be a chimney that you have to fly straight out of before you can get airborne. Most birds have a bit of a forward trajectory when they take off. Pigeons can take off vertically. They also nest on cliff edges. And so that’s why they do very well in cities, because they’re used to those kinds of environments.

I was conscious of the home not being a benign idea for lots of people.

A wild in-between: in-between nature and the city, in between domestic and free. I thought it was a useful creature to think of as a metaphor for all sorts of transitions. Couriers occupy a similar position in the London imagination, or at least used to. I’m not sure how much they still do, because they’re massively on the decline. There was something about the freedom of the courier and the wildness and the dirtiness and the smelliness, because we did stink. I stank. For years I used to turn up at literary events stinking after a day in the saddle. It’s pretty anti-social. Maybe I had this affinity with pigeons because we were both reviled. We’re both outsiders. But of course, there was a kind of freedom in that too, and I liked that. When I was a courier, I used to really enjoy the privileged access to large buildings you’ve got. As soon as you walk into a building with the authority of having a package to deliver, you’re sort of invisible, but you can also get this amazing backstage view of the city. I mean, I knew all the goods lifts. You could get to the twentieth floor of the Gherkin and look out over this city, which you felt you owned because you’d cycled every street. You knew it as well as the cabbies (our mortal enemy), or whatever. So pigeons are a symbolic bird for me, in all sorts of ways.

If you were an animal, do you think you’d be a pigeon? 

Why not? They are quite human creatures. They’re sociable, they’re good parents, they are not as smart as corvids. But they have a more human intelligence. I think corvids are kind of evil geniuses. They can use tools and solve problems. Pigeons are communal. I do have an affinity with them. Whether I’d be one, I don’t know. I might have one as my daemon, like in Philip Pullman.

Do you think your perception of the natural world/industrialised world has changed since keeping pigeons?  

I suppose I see the two as much less isolated. Pigeons did seem to dramatise or manifest that transition between natural and urban. There’s this amazing description of pigeon keepers that I really love, from a Dickens essay in his magazine, Household Worlds. He wrote it in the late nineteenth century about Spitalfields. He describes pigeon fanciers on their roofs, men who worked in these dirty factories all day, who then go up onto the roofs of their buildings and fly their birds. And there was the sense of a communion with something outside of themselves and beyond the surface of the Earth, in the air, something angelic, something transcendental and sublime that Dickens really identified in that relationship. I don’t work in a squalid factory, although, I suppose when I was a courier, I did work in some unpleasant conditions. That sense of freedom that you get when you see a creature that you’ve known in the hand or in the loft, being free and flying and doing what it wants is really powerful and does sort of dramatise the artificial divide between…

Human culture and animal nature? 

Exactly. That Donna Haraway phrase ‘becoming with’, I really like because it describes all forms of animal encounter. I’m not really a natural pet owner or keeper. But I would see it as a more honest relationship than that between a dog owner or a pampered cat owner. It’s more like a farmer’s relationship with the flock. I’m not a vegetarian. I do eat meat and I acknowledge that there’s a lot of bad inside the meat industry. There’s bad husbandry, and there’s a lot of animal suffering in the world, but I don’t think at its root, it’s an unethical relationship. The same is true of pigeons and their fanciers.

Was pigeon fancying an escape from a state of existential homelessness? 

I wanted them to be. They gave me something to obsess over for a few years when I was going through certain things. I moved house and had a family and was entering a new stage of my life. I wanted to think about what that meant and felt like. Obviously, it’s a great joy and a great privilege having children but it’s also a huge change. Trying to reconcile yourself to that change and the freedoms it seems, at least on the surface, to curtail. The freedoms I had as a courier were all about cycling around madly through London and going out every night and doing whatever I wanted. As soon as you have children, you can’t necessarily live that life. Pigeons were a way of reconciling myself to that and learning what it meant to stay put. They were good teachers in that regard, but also just the activity of getting obsessive about this strange community, the strange world of pigeon fanciers – I found it all fascinating, and they are extraordinary creatures.

The part of your book that stuck with me the most was your juxtaposition between Johnny who has ‘never in his life left the island of Great Britain’ and the exiled French Philosopher Simone Weil. While Johnny couldn’t be more rooted and Weil more displaced, both appear, in your text, to be isolated and, perhaps, lonely. What do you make of our contemporary politics and the contested idea of ‘homeland’?

It was a theme in this book. I wrote it in the period when Theresa May was responsible for sending buses and billboards across the UK in areas which had high numbers of immigrants. Ads with slogans like, ‘Go home or face arrest’. I didn’t really write much about Brexit, but the word home has been (and I hate the phrase) weaponised in various ways by politics. Of course, it’s there in fascism. It’s there in the blood and soil of lots of far-right movements. It’s there in the idea of the nation as a home, or the domestic ecologies of various political systems. It has been used by, primarily the right, to exclude people. In these contexts home has become a place that isn’t about welcoming strangers in but, instead, has become a way of saying, ‘No, this is my home. Get out.’

The dominant narrative over the Brexit years hasn’t eased. I was very conscious of that when I was writing the book and trying to interrogate it to a certain degree. I don’t know how successful that was, but it’s only become worse, I think, since writing the book and I don’t see any way out of it. The little boats, the policing of borders, and boundaries: all of that is not going anywhere, is it? The climate crisis will exacerbate these kinds of political, reductive arguments. I was conscious of the home not being a benign idea for lots of people. Where are you from? Where’s your home? What’s your homeland? These are charged questions, even if asked relatively benignly, and that was something I wanted to think about.

You write, ‘I grew up with a deep sense of the importance of the need for roots, a sense that was complicated by a distrust of the ideals of national belonging and identity that sometimes accompany it… this was because both my parents from elsewhere?’ Do you think restlessness can be inherited?  

My mother wasn’t forced to leave. She is Dutch, and she moved freely and of her own volition. I think the idea of exile and forced migration and asylum and so on are different, and probably do have much more long-lasting effects on a life. I think both my parents wanted to be elsewhere, and that’s not something I’ve inherited. Actually, quite the opposite. I love staying put. I hate travelling.

It’s not a happy book and I’ve not been happy writing it.

There’s a genre of writing, of a man going out on a journey and finding stuff out. And that was partly what I was doing in the cycling book, I suppose: going on these little adventures. But in Homing, I wanted to stay put and stay in one place and stay at home and think about travelling imaginatively via these pigeons. I got quite interested in books like Xavier de Maistre’s, A Journey Around My Room, which is this mad eighteenth-century book about a guy who was put under house arrest after a duel, and then tries to imagine, or to describe in great detail, the rooms in which he’s confined as though he were going on an epic journey. I love that idea as a sort of conceit. What does it mean to stay really close and attend to the local in the way that lots of creatures do? Easy and cheap international travel is a recent invention. One reason pigeon racing was so popular in the 50s and 60s is because most people really couldn’t see the world in any other way. And nowadays, for good and bad, the rise of cheap flights and mass tourism has meant that it’s much more possible for most people, at least in the West, to see more of the world, or at least to think they’re seeing more of the world. I’m really quite allergic to that. I hate travel. I hate planes. I hate the idea of going places. I hate the bureaucracy of it, the psychic restlessness of it. In that sense I’m with Simone Weil. My dad travelled a lot for work. He was away a lot when we were children, and I think he got very animated by it and energised by it. But it saps me. I would be happy never travelling again.

Is Homing an anti-travel book? 

That’s exactly what I wanted it to be. I’m not saying I’ll never go on a journey again and write about it. But wouldn’t it be a lovely thing to never fly ever again?

It’s a great mentality. 

Even putting aside the environmental costs of it. It saps the soul. It’s bad for humans. It’s bad for the planet. It’s undignified. Get corralled into this unpleasant environment where people try and sell you stuff for two hours and then you’re sitting in a tube. I probably will fly again in my lifetime. I don’t drive, I can’t drive. I suppose I try and avoid the combustion engine as much as possible. But I think the world has to change more than materially to accommodate real slow travel. Imagine if you couldn’t have a holiday every summer to Spain or whatever, but if every other year you could get two months off work to take a slow journey somewhere and have a really profound experience. Would that not be a better model? Think of medieval travel, it was arduous and difficult and tiring. It would have taken you months to get to Magaluf or wherever. The bike is about the right speed for me for travelling.

It is refreshing to see a male author defy the trope of the lone male wanderer and, instead, make a case for tending to something more permanent: a home, a domestic space, a family. Yet, you also admit you felt Baudelaire’s ‘horror of home’ and were ‘gripped by a vague and manic wanderlust’. You became addicted to watching ‘Youtube videos in which men with plaid shirts and full beards restored wooden sailing boots milling wood they’d felled themselves’. How do you think masculinity is changing in our modern world? 

I did get into those, still am. There is this kind of poisonous vulnerability that you get online. I don’t have any social media accounts, but occasionally I have a look, and it’s appalling. Musk’s Twitter is revolting. I don’t know if you saw that viral news story of a woman who’d finished a PhD at Cambridge and put a photograph of it up online, and hundreds of thousands of men wrote things like, ‘This is bullshit. Why are you doing this? This is why universities are going down the toilet.’ Her subject was English literature, and she was researching a really interesting sounding thing about smell and contemporary modern fiction. And they were just laying into her. Certain kinds of men are vulnerable to the kinds of hyper-masculine radicalisation that various charlatans are peddling online, the Andrew Tates, the Jordan Petersons of this world. But I don’t think framing it as a failure of society to accommodate the needs of those men is a good thing. The stats on things like male suicide are really shocking and distressing, but I don’t think men have it bad, and certainly not enough in the society I live in, to argue that there’s something explainable or excusable about the viciousness of some men’s behaviour. Just look at the trial in France of Gisèle Pelicot’s husband. Absolutely awful. It exposes the quotidian horrors of patriarchy. In a small town in France, there can be so many numbers of men who want to rape a woman. It’s not even unimaginable. Masculinity has always been in crisis, probably, but I don’t have much time for it. Get over yourselves.

You write that keeping pigeons helped you become a father because they taught you how to let go of things and how to anticipate your own children one day flying the nest. 

Parenting is a lot of tolerating distances that feel painful or worrying. Learning to let your child discover the world for themselves while also retaining that sense of connection with you. At the moment, all my worries are practical. Do they have food, can they go to the toilet? In time, emotional distance will come into play. They’ll want not to be around us. They’ll think I’m their weird pigeon fancying Dad and they’re going to be embarrassed by us. They’ll want distance.

But they’ll come back. 

Well, that’s the hope isn’t it? But it’s not always the case. The birds provide a metaphor for that gradually increasing distance, but they also always come back. That is what you hope for in a family. I’ve reflected on it a lot more since my father died last year. We did come back to each other, we were close. Like all relationships, it was sometimes contested, but I’ve never been that far away from my family, and I feel fortunate for that.

Are you working on another book? 

I’ve just finished a book which has taken me a long time to write. It’s very different to anything I’ve written before. It’s a kind of family memoir. It’s not a happy book and I’ve not been happy writing it. I’m glad to have got it over with and now I’m writing something much more benign. It’s a book about hoarding, and my father who was a bit of a hoarder. He left a lot of stuff behind. We’ve spent the time since his death working through it. It is also about mainly twentieth-century writers and artists who had pathological relationships with things, and what that tells us about art, and the world.

On the one hand the idea of hoarding makes one want to become a minimalist to spite consumerism and capitalism yet, on the other, isn’t it everyone’s right to be able to own possessions? 

Hoarding as a mental illness and disorder is a recent phenomenon. It’s only in the last one hundred and twenty years or so that it has these associations with madness. The etymology of the word is much more to do with miserliness and sinfulness, rather than irrationality. If you called someone a hoarder in the late seventeenth century you would have been accusing them of being a bit tight. Whereas now we think of it as insanity. A hoarder is someone who has an irrational attachment to ‘worthless’ things. That’s because – and this isn’t a particularly insightful observation, but it’s true – in a world increasingly full of stuff, it is easier to have objects divorced from their value. You might not have recognised a hoarder in Medieval England because everything that was worth hoarding was worth something. You hoard your turnips, you need your turnips. But hoarding bikes or papers, things that now have little economical value: it’s a funny compulsion.

Like magpies.  

Yeah, or bower birds. The males construct these elaborate ground nests comprised of coloured plastic and rubbish. They make these extraordinary structures to attract a mate. They’re these beautiful, useless things. I think that is what my dad was doing, He was not indiscriminate, but it’s just what he thought was valuable wasn’t necessarily what society deemed valuable.

When I write, I can be magpie-like in the way I hoard books, and words. All books are born out of obsession, which is why they get written, because they are painful things to do.

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Image credit: Jonathan Ashworth.

Jon Day studied English at St John’s College, Oxford, and now teaches at King’s College, London. He has written essays and reviews for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, n+1, Bookforum, the Times Literary Supplement and many others. He is a regular book critic for the Financial Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph, and writes about art for Apollo. His first book, Cyclogeography, was published by Notting Hill Editions in 2015. It was read on the BBC World Service, and selected as a book of the year in the Observer and the Guardian. His second book, Homing, was published in 2019 by John Murray, and A Twitch Upon the Thread, an edited selection of fishing writing, was published in 2019 by Notting Hill Editions.