The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things. Tim Radford

      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.

      The climate is not the only thing that has changed: the mainland of Europe is also moving, and Britain is inching away from America at the rate that fingernails grow, and taking my home with it. I move towards the dawn because the planet is rotating on its axis, but it is also doing something else: it is whizzing around the Sun in a huge ellipse, at very roughly thirty kilometres a second. The Sun, too, is moving: it is after all a modest main sequence star – a star like billions of others, and with billions of years of life left in which to burn steadily – near the rim of a galactic disc which is itself spinning on a central axis, so the Sun proceeds around the centre of the galaxy, moving up and down like a horse on a fairground carousel, at a stately two hundred kilometres a second. The galaxy is moving too, but how fast and in which direction depends upon which other galaxy you choose to measure from.

      So when I sometimes say I don’t know where I am, I am not kidding. I do not have an answer. Nor do I feel alone in asking the question. ‘Where am I?’ could be the oldest question in history. For the moment, at least, I have an answer of sorts. I am in a house that has a very precise geography, over which I have some temporary control. Desk and chair, the books on the shelves, the rug on the floor, the calendar on the wall, are there because I put them there, and I am at liberty to move them. They are intimate landmarks, places from which, unconsciously, I may take a bearing. I can place myself in relation to the walls, to the rooms, to the floors and ceiling. In this house, I know where I am. There is a ‘here’ in which I can locate myself. It is a place in which I may choose to stay for hours, or days, without running the risk of being moved on by the police. It is, at the moment of writing, my home. There is a legal document