Addresses

Around the mid 1700s, the Prussians (who else?) decided it would be a good idea to number all the houses in a town to make every house easy to find.

The British followed suit after a while but decided to “get creative”.

Hence, some streets are numbered as they are in Canada, while others are numbered in arithmetic sequence along one side of the street and then the numbers carry back in the opposite direction down the other side of the street.

That’s why the Prime Minister’s Residence at 10 Downing Street is NEXT DOOR to Number 11 Downing Street, rather than across the street from it.

This led to my understandable confusion when I was walking along an old street by my flat.

I was looking for number 120.

It was (of course! How stupid of me!) across from number 1.

I get lost a lot.

So do delivery drivers, one of whom walked by me with a piece of paper in his hand the other morning muttering “Where the fuck is 92?”

Numerical eccentricity aside, some places don’t even have numbers, just names.

I used to think that was a fictional indulgence of English authors, or just a cute affectation in children’s books, because small children like drawings of odd little buildings made of shamrocks with fanciful names like “Daisy Cottage”.

No rational postal system could possibly function without some kind of digital logic animating it, I reasoned.

Wrong.

The following is a real postal address in England:

Tiny Cottage, Deanland, Sixpenny, Handley

What kind of address is that? How do you punch that into your GPS?

No wonder the Germans abandoned the idea of invading England: they realized they would never have been able to find anything.