THE ADDRESS BOOK starts with some of the fundamental questions
asked by everyone, in every culture since the beginning of
civilisation. Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going? Tim
Radford attempts to answer them by drafting in a technique he
first used as a school-boy, when he wrote his address in the
inside front cover of his exercise book every term, starting
with the house number, the street name, the town, and proceeding
upwards through levels of scale - the hemisphere, the planet,
the solar system, the galaxy -- until he reached the final line,
the universe itself. So -- this is a book written on a vertical
rather than a horizontal axis. We open with Tim in the present
day, in Hastings, sitting at his desk, thinking about his house,
his possessions, how they have shaped him and how he has
affected them, how a house becomes part of our identity and what
binds us to the objects in it. The next chapter deals with
Hastings itself; the town as a unit of scale, why we associate
ourselves with one place rather