This year, Benjamin Myers built more bird boxes than he could ever possibly have purpose for.

Picture a book case never built.

Picture it in pieces, dreaming of completion. See the wood and the nails and the glue, the infinite possibilities.

Consider the planks, cut to length for what was only ever an idea of a shelf.

Theen look at it again: that’s not a book case, fool. It’s a birdbox.

2025 then was the year of the hammer and the saw and the rusty old saw-horse kept by the back door.

I am an impractical man. I serve no purpose other than to observe, expound and write it all down. I tit about, semi-professionally. But with the great unbuilt book case lying in parts I one day viewed it from a different angle and suddenly saw dozens of bird boxes instead, ramshackle things of different shapes and sizes, wonky one and all. And then I got to work.

All summer long during spare snatched minutes between writing novels and screenplays about dead German actors and communes and sadistic priests and strange things unearthed from the English soil, I drove my saw until the teeth of the blade bit the wood and I began to build bird boxes – more than I could ever possibly have purpose for. By summer’s end I had an entire housing estate of avian abodes, a metropolis of miniscule mansions for our feathered friends.

I did this mainly while listening to the comforting French language lullabies of À Feu Doux by Kevin Fowley on Basin Rock.

Then began the task of distributing them, which I did by climbing trees with scissors and string held fast between my teeth. Once, while scouting suitable locations on a Friday night, I tumbled down a dried-out waterfall and thought for a moment that I had broken my typing arm.

Life looks different up a tree, and it’s my belief that all capable adults should shin up a trunk or shuffle a long a branch every now and again — if only to communicate with our inner simian, our ancestors of old. Or maybe just to enjoy the view. Even just fifteen feet up the world becomes a different place.

So the book case never got built and my books fill different space instead, but safe in their hand-made homes the birds are, I like to think, smiling in their sleep while dreaming of fat worms the length of England.

I write these words on my phone with a thirteen week old puppy called the Earl Of Sandwich – Sandy – sitting in my lap (see Shadows & Reflections 2024) as an early Saturday sun rouses itself beneath the coarse grey blankets of winter. The dog still has the hot sweet breath of new life and biscuits, his eyes surprised by everything. 

Outside dead nettle stalks sag beyond the window where the black meadow yawns.

The sky is a murder-mystery, but the fires are lit.

The deer are back again.

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Benjamin Myers’ latest novel ‘Jesus Christ Kinski’ is out now on Bloomsbury.