This report comes to you from a little blue room of birds. The south wall consists of bookshelves above two built-in cupboards. An inbuilt gap in the middle allows the shelves to double as a desk. Nobody has used it as a desk. This report is being written on the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Warned by an angel, the Magi – the three wise men, astronomers ‘of colour’, as some would say now, more attentive to skin tone than aware of where on earth knowledge of the skies anciently was located – flee King Herod’s land. They had meant well. They arrived with happy news of a kingly child. What a thing to tell a reigning king. Herod ‘had all the male children killed who were two years old or under, reckoning by the date he had been careful to ask the wise men’. (Matthew 2:16, Jerusalem Bible). O trustful astronomers, who had not foreseen slaughter, when they gave the coordinates. My report’s coordinates of place and time? Blue-infused, with birdcalls, on the fourth day of Christmas, 2023.

The ‘twelve days of Christmas’ run from 25 December onwards. 6 January is el día de los Reyes, the Day of the Kings. I cared less for their journey, than the excitement of counting. Where number failed was awesome. King Herod allegedly killing all the male children under the age of two: how? Checking a census? Searching all the nooks? How many is ‘all’? The rabbits in Richard Adams’s Watership Down can count up to four in Lapine, the language Adams invented for them. Anything ...