Today I found myself wondering whether pigeons know they’re in London. I know. This is the kind of extremely important question my brain apparently decides to spend time on. But seriously, does a pigeon sitting in Trafalgar Square know it is in London?

Obviously, it probably doesn’t know the word London. It doesn’t know that it is in the capital of the United Kingdom, that Westminster is over there, or that somewhere around it there are boroughs, postcodes and administrative boundaries. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t know where it is. A pigeon knows its world. It recognises places, remembers routes, knows where food appears, where it can sleep, where it feels safe and how to get back home. Its map might not have names written on it, but there is still a map.

And that thought suddenly fascinated me, because maybe one of the differences between the pigeon and me is not that I know where I am and it doesn’t. Maybe it is that I have put names on everything. I am not simply here. I am in London, in England, in the United Kingdom, in Europe, on planet Earth. Layers and layers of words placed over exactly the same piece of ground.

And then, because apparently thinking about pigeons wasn’t enough for one day, my brain went somewhere else: borders. Because names are one thing, but borders are another. At some point, human beings didn’t just name places. We divided them. This is mine, that is yours, this is our country, that is your country, you can live on this side of the line, you need permission to live on that one.

I find that incredibly strange. Not because animals don’t have territories. Of course they do. Animals protect nests, food, mates and spaces. But humans managed to turn territory into something abstract. We drew lines across enormous pieces of the planet and collectively decided that those invisible lines were real. Sometimes there is a river there, sometimes a mountain, sometimes there is absolutely nothing. The grass doesn’t stop, the clouds don’t stop, birds don’t stop, but we do.

We need passports, visas and permissions. Where we happened to be born can determine which parts of the same planet we are allowed to enter, how long we are allowed to stay there, whether we are allowed to work there, live there or build a life there. And I know countries and borders have histories, cultures, governments, laws and incredibly complicated reasons for existing. I’m not pretending the world can be reorganised because I had an existential crisis while looking at a pigeon. But underneath all of that complexity, there is still something that feels completely absurd to me.

The Earth was here before us. Nobody made it. Nobody arrived first with a little flag and a property deed. We were born on it, and yet somehow we created a world in which one human being can tell another human being: you cannot stand on this particular piece of Earth without my permission. I have always struggled with that idea. I don’t feel that the Earth belongs to anyone. I think we belong to it.

And maybe that is why the pigeon question stayed in my head, because if you removed every name, every map, every border, every passport, every flag and every human idea about who owns what, the place underneath would still be here. The Thames would still flow, the rain would still fall, the trees would still grow, and the pigeon would still know how to get home. Maybe the pigeon doesn’t know it’s in London. Maybe it just knows where it is. And I’m starting to wonder which one of us has the stranger idea of the world.