The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things

The Address Book

Our Place in the Scheme of Things

TIM RADFORD

To my family

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One: The Number and the Street - Whose House is it Anyway?

Chapter Two: The Town - The Man from Somewhere

Chapter Three: The County - A Piece of Chalk

Chapter Four: The Country - England, Their England

Chapter Five: The Nation - How to Unite a Kingdom

Chapter Six: The Continent - An Attempt to Join Europe

Chapter Seven: The Hemisphere - A Divided World

Chapter Eight: The Planet - Down to Earth

Chapter Nine: The Solar System - Places in the Sun

Chapter Ten: The Galaxy - There Goes the Neighbourhood

Chapter Eleven: The Universe - All There is

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The Number and the Street Whose House is it Anyway?

I miss my little midnight companion, the death watch beetle. Years ago, in the study late at night, in the spring or the autumn, I would sometimes hear him tick, three or four times in a row, like a tiny clock, calling vainly for a potential mate. Right now, it is high summer. I sit in an old study with brick floors, a rough plaster-and-beam ceiling and oak-panelled walls, obscured before me and to my right hand by oak shelves of books, journals, collections of magazine cuttings and bundles of notes; and for the most part I sit in silence. Through a window to my left hand, divided by little diamonds of lead, I can see an unruly rose, some assertive honeysuckle and some leaves of a spiky Mahonia japonica, and a few yards beyond these warring shrubs the conical tip of a clipped yew, and beyond that again, the highest branches of a silver birch, and beyond those, only a clear blue sky.

In spring, or in the early morning, I could expect to hear the clamour of a wren, the song of a blackbird or thrush, the chatter of a magpie, the murmuring of wood pigeons and collared doves or the mewing of herring gulls. But right now, this minute, with the late morning sun making patterns on the linen curtain over the window to the left of my desk, the only noise is the muted clatter of the keyboard.

The trees are mine, or rather ours, in a limited sense: for many years we nursed them in pots in the tiny garden of an outer-London home, and then carried them to this house in the snowbound winter of 1985, to plant them at the first thaw and watch them begin their push towards the sky. The room in which I sit and the house and gardens beyond it are mine – or rather ours – in the technical sense that a mortgage has been cleared, and the deeds that indicate our possession rest in the vault of a solicitor. These bits of paper establish this address, and my place in it, and seem to answer a very old and intermittently troubling question: where am I?

At the start of each school term, at the age of about ten, I did something that I suppose a million other ten-year-olds have done: I wrote my name in an exercise book, along with my house number and street. I then added the name of the suburb, and the city. Then, for good measure, I named the administrative region in which my city stood, and just to make sure, the country. And then – where did I imagine I might lose this book, and who would find it? – I wrote ‘the Earth’, and just in case that wasn’t precise enough, I added ‘the solar system’. At some point in the performance of this ritual, I decided I had better make absolutely sure, and appended the triumphant conclusion ‘the universe’. Later on – much later on – I realised that to be truly pernickety I should have also included the continent in which my country counted itself, the hemisphere I happened to be in, and the galaxy of which the Sun is but one mild little spark, before concluding with the cosmos itself, the whole bag of tricks.

Even at the time, it seemed an obsessive little ritual, but ten-year-olds are embarrassed about neither obsession nor rite. Across the interval of the decades, however, it occurs to me that it might have been my first independent search for answers to questions posed consciously and unconsciously by everyone in every culture, and in every generation: who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? To answer questions like that, you have to start somewhere. You start with the question: where am I now? Where I come from is a clue to who I am, and where I find myself is a point on a trajectory through space and time. Place is a powerful part of identity.

I have a precise postal address, but I do not know where I am. I am sitting still, but I am also hurtling eastwards at an estimated six hundred miles – more or less 1,000 kilometres, to use the internationally agreed scientific unit – an hour. On the Equator, I would be going even faster than sound: towards the dawn at a thousand miles an hour. So even when I sit at home, I am a moving target. The house in which I live is built upon solid rock, but sandstone crumbles perceptibly, and the coast upon which I live is eroding. It is also sinking. I am going down in the world. One day, the ruins of this house will ooze into the sea. The ground beneath my feet sinks and heaves and distorts with episodes of drought and flood and frost. I do not see it, but over the years I observe house doors and garden gates that almost jam, or bolts that don’t quite fit their hafts, and I conclude that the surface that underpins them has shifted again. So not only do I not know where I am, I do not always know whether I am up or down. The county in which I have made my home is a byword for respectability and order, at the southern edge of a small and densely populated temperate island in which the water runs hot and cold and the trains quite often run on time. But only a few thousand years ago, this county was part of a continent, and a few tens of thousands of years ago it was near the frontier of vast, approaching glaciers, and a few hundreds of thousands of years before that, lions and rhinoceroses roamed its grassy plains.