Speaker 1: Hollo. I'm morecan stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: As a rule, when you retire from the post office,
Speaker 2: you're supposed to get bored. This wisdom was dispensed with
Speaker 2: my carriage clock, the one they give you after four
Speaker 2: decades steering the world's churning mail system towards the right doors.
Speaker 2: But lately boredom is not my problem. Three days a
Speaker 2: week I find myself hunched at a fold out table
Speaker 2: in the parish hall, sifting through maps and records, as
Speaker 2: one of several volunteer modernizers for the Tillingford Village Council.
Speaker 2: The idea is to cross check every address for a
Speaker 2: new digital system, so that nothing or no one gets missed,
Speaker 2: not by the post, not by the ambulance, not by
Speaker 2: the person who's come knocking about a burst pipe. On
Speaker 2: the day that unsettles everything, the sun falls in big
Speaker 2: golden blocks across main Street. It is that early April light.
Speaker 2: The hedge is still half tangled with last year's brambles,
Speaker 2: but every crocus bowled against the stone. My folder is
Speaker 2: thick with printouts and hand dannotated diagrams, and the list
Speaker 2: for the morning is clear I am to verify that
Speaker 2: each house is correctly represented house owner visible number, so
Speaker 2: that the council's records finally match what is on the ground,
Speaker 2: down to the very last digit. That's how I come
Speaker 2: to be pausing outside number eight, which is as clearly
Speaker 2: marked with its crisp blue number as on my sheet. Eight,
Speaker 2: then ten on the other side of the grocer's number
Speaker 2: twelve with its battered enamel plaque, neat and right. But
Speaker 2: after number twelve there is a gap, a neat, whitewashed
Speaker 2: semi trailing, an overgrown rosemary bush, then a brick house
Speaker 2: with a smart green door. My list calls this number sixteen.
Speaker 2: Here's the thing. The house between is right there, as
Speaker 2: real as rain, but there is no number, not on
Speaker 2: the door, gate, post, wall or bin. A careful hand
Speaker 2: unknown has rubbed and painted every reachable surface, but there's
Speaker 2: not so much as the ghost of a nail hole
Speaker 2: or a square of faded paint to suggest a number
Speaker 2: ever existed. I look back at my print out Main
Speaker 2: Street fourteen. It is meant to be as real as
Speaker 2: the others. The musty official records in my fold are
Speaker 2: all listed title Deed, Council, Tax, Fire Service, report house
Speaker 2: number fourteen. Yet unless the house is hiding its numerals
Speaker 2: on the back side, number fourteen has eluded every attempt
Speaker 2: at external display. I try not to overthink it. It is,
Speaker 2: after all, not unusual in old villages for numbers to
Speaker 2: loosen over time. Bored teenagers repainting, simple neglect. But this
Speaker 2: is odd, not untidy, not faded, not even so much
Speaker 2: as a mark to suggest something was ever attached. I
Speaker 2: finger the edge of my print out, a ridiculous gesture,
Speaker 2: as if the papers might resolve the contradiction by tactile inspection.
Speaker 2: On impulse, I cross the street and walk past twice,
Speaker 2: checking the next three houses. Sure enough, sixteen abuts the
Speaker 2: mystery house, and beyond that eighteen, then twenty. Each of
Speaker 2: those is numbered, some more faded than others, but all present.
Speaker 2: A little further down, I see missus Beadon, winding string
Speaker 2: around the handles of her shopping bag. Morning Missus Beadon,
Speaker 2: I call, and she waves back. I watch as her
Speaker 2: friend joins her, and rather than a number, the directions
Speaker 2: exchanged are past the blue door or beside the wall,
Speaker 2: where the tangle is not a single number mentioned. I
Speaker 2: duck back to the parish Hall for the mid morning
Speaker 2: council review. Mind ticking. Our purpose this month is to
Speaker 2: finalize the new master directory, Missus Pembroke. The chair is saying,
Speaker 2: let's make sure we've sorted out the odd numbers on
Speaker 2: main Street this time. The emergency services do need it clear.
Speaker 2: Her remarks flip past me. But a phrase catches the
Speaker 2: odd numbers? Are they really there? Something about the row
Speaker 2: keeps nudging at me, like an unfinished thought. The others
Speaker 2: press on with parking permits and garden waste, but my
Speaker 2: mind is fixed at the gap, the absence that feels
Speaker 2: whole finished, not a mistake, but a completed omission. It
Speaker 2: is only a note in the margin for now, my
Speaker 2: own private query, jotted discreetly at the corner of a
Speaker 2: print out. Check are all numbers visible or only on paper?
Speaker 2: The day continues, but an itch has started that on
Speaker 2: other mornings would have faded. This time I find I
Speaker 2: am urgently, quietly unable to let it go. Tillingford is
Speaker 2: the kind of village that councils use for photo opportunities.
Speaker 2: River on one side, water meadows on the other, stone
Speaker 2: bridges and new saplings by the school gates. It's been
Speaker 2: inhabited for something like eight centuries. And there are corners
Speaker 2: if you walk early or late, where the lanes fold
Speaker 2: in on themselves, brambled footpaths behind hen coops, timbered bay
Speaker 2: windows that droop over the alleys, garden gates so old
Speaker 2: the iron is tamed by the moss. Since my retirement
Speaker 2: last autumn, I've spent my mornings wandering these strange, lovely loops,
Speaker 2: half for the walking and half for the irresistible compulsion
Speaker 2: to note things, sketch new maps for nobody's benefit but
Speaker 2: my own. My working years were spent plotting delivery routes
Speaker 2: for towns much bigger, less forgiving than this. In retirement
Speaker 2: ideal in curiosities rather than crises. My specialty is noticing oddities,
Speaker 2: not just in the fabric of the village, but in
Speaker 2: the ways that maps refuse to hold it all. Tillingford
Speaker 2: is forever resisting tidy categories, a tendency not to match expectation,
Speaker 2: which is supposed to be what people like about a village,
Speaker 2: unless you're the one trying to overlay a digital system
Speaker 2: on it. No one gets away with taking themselves too
Speaker 2: seriously here. The Modernization Committee is mostly retarease and the
Speaker 2: odd working from home software person. Missus Pembroke runs the
Speaker 2: council with a certain strict goods cheer, the kind that says,
Speaker 2: do things properly, but don't make a fuss if the
Speaker 2: world disagrees. The real pulse, though, is in people like
Speaker 2: Missus Norley at the post office, who claims with dry
Speaker 2: pride to have never lost a letter yet, despite computers
Speaker 2: and what not, she presides over the counter with suspiciously
Speaker 2: sharp ears and knows not only every surname dating back
Speaker 2: a century in places, but also each house garden dog
Speaker 2: tendency to pay bills on Friday or leave them for Monday.
Speaker 2: Among the newer arrivals, there's mister Dowers, who moved in
Speaker 2: just shy of three years ago and attends council meetings
Speaker 2: mostly out of a sense of neighborly duty, or perhaps
Speaker 2: because he likes watching the locals unfold their routines. He's
Speaker 2: forever asking about the logistics of school runs and delivery routes,
Speaker 2: over apologizing for big city habits, hoping to fit in
Speaker 2: by collecting stories and picking up habits of long time residents.
Speaker 2: The rest are a blend old families who have lived
Speaker 2: on the same quarter acre for generations, newcomers who have
Speaker 2: quickly found their place, and a handful of children always
Speaker 2: careering down the lanes in improbable packs, propelled presumably by
Speaker 2: some system of social vectors known only to themselves. I
Speaker 2: could tell you what time the milk arrives at each corner,
Speaker 2: or which boat will be mooring up at the River
Speaker 2: Green on market mornings. But if you looked for any
Speaker 2: of these rhythms on an official map, you'd have to
Speaker 2: guess even the street names. Rebel Fishers Alley becomes Letchford
Speaker 2: Row on Google one month, then flips back the next.
Speaker 2: The moment any external system tries to pin down Tillingford,
Speaker 2: the evidence wriggles away. There's a parallel project on Council
Speaker 2: bringing in new broadband, redesigning signs, standardizing house and road
Speaker 2: names to suit national systems, which has lately drawn a
Speaker 2: quiet border between the old ways and what's considered proper
Speaker 2: for the twenty first century. I hear this friction in
Speaker 2: the pub where people debate whether path or footway ought
Speaker 2: to go on the new signs. But below that there's
Speaker 2: a subtler resistance, the sense that the lived village and
Speaker 2: the mapped village remain forever parallel. The modernization has happened before.
Speaker 2: In waves, I saw job sheets in the parish archives
Speaker 2: from the nineteen forties, with confident lists now erased by
Speaker 2: the next project. My walks, with their half playful, half
Speaker 2: professional checking of every door should be an easy job,
Speaker 2: and yet after the morning's encounter with the missing number,
Speaker 2: I realize this is more than a case of untidy habits.
Speaker 2: By late afternoon, I am back at the parish hall,
Speaker 2: brow furrowed, sorting through the merged digital address list and
Speaker 2: the musty hand copied parish records. There's a column for
Speaker 2: physical verification, meant to tick off which mapped houses correspond
Speaker 2: to real looked at dwellings. That's when I find it.
Speaker 2: Five entries, all on Main Street, listed with numbers, each
Speaker 2: with matches, utility accounts and property deeds, but with no
Speaker 2: corresponding visible number in my fresh column of notes. The
Speaker 2: database is supposed to be new, but the same entries
Speaker 2: appear on the nineteen seventy two parish list and again
Speaker 2: on a brown nearly a legible sheet dated nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 2: Plenty of houses had lost or swapped numbers over the years, yes,
Speaker 2: but these five entries always seem to be numbered sequentially
Speaker 2: in the records, even when the actual numbers are gone, or,
Speaker 2: as I am now realizing, never affixed at all. The
Speaker 2: matter is brought home to me within the week when
Speaker 2: Tom Beadon, a local handerman, appears at the hall clutching
Speaker 2: his utility bill, looking displeased his house the old brick
Speaker 2: semi between the grocers and the river bank listed in
Speaker 2: my records as number twenty two Main Street, Tillingford, as
Speaker 2: a water meter gone rogue. I accompany him part way
Speaker 2: up the lane, curious now in a different register. As
Speaker 2: we arrive, I pay close attention to the front gate,
Speaker 2: the paint work around the door, the wall beside the
Speaker 2: post box, same as before, immaculate maintenance, but no sign
Speaker 2: of a number at all. I ask, as lightly as
Speaker 2: I can, did you ever have a number here? Tom?
Speaker 2: Or is it just not put up yet? He grins
Speaker 2: far as I remember, never has been one. The post
Speaker 2: still gets here, bins two fewer arguments. That way, perhaps
Speaker 2: people know where I am. I probe, with a touch
Speaker 2: more persistence, checking for past repaints or old hardware. Ever
Speaker 2: remove a number plaque reposition the door, he chuckles, drawing
Speaker 2: in two neighbors from over the hedge who join with
Speaker 2: amused agreement. No, never, not since his dad bought the
Speaker 2: house after the war. Never a number neighbors made fun
Speaker 2: when we first moved in, so we got away with
Speaker 2: hiding from salesmen that way, he adds. Both neighbors agree
Speaker 2: their own houses have numbers, though they think is never did,
Speaker 2: or maybe there used to be one back in the seventies.
Speaker 2: One shrugs, then shares a story about a missing cat instead.
Speaker 2: Yet while I stand there too long, trying not to stare,
Speaker 2: the post van shudders into view. The posty Danny deposits
Speaker 2: mail in Tom's box without hesitation. Let us neatly addressed
Speaker 2: to twenty two Main Street. Tom remarks, see they always
Speaker 2: know where to come. I return to the hall uneasier.
Speaker 2: It's not just one house, nor neglect, nor paperwork laziness.
Speaker 2: If it's an accident. The village seems very consistently careless
Speaker 2: in only one particular way, and yet nobody, not the
Speaker 2: post not the county council, seems to think anything is
Speaker 2: the least bit broken. My notes now bear a question
Speaker 2: I can no longer suppress. Is this simply a patchwork
Speaker 2: of eccentric local habit or is there something more deliberate,
Speaker 2: even if unspoken, at play. I promise myself to pay
Speaker 2: closer attention and to document the specifics as thoroughly as
Speaker 2: I know how. The next morning, after the mists screws
Speaker 2: itself from the river and the streets are properly aired,
Speaker 2: I set off with a marked up map and clipboard,
Speaker 2: determined to catalog every instance of missing or perhaps mythical numbers.
Speaker 2: Rather than trusting to memory, I use a slow, careful circuit,
Speaker 2: pausing at each door, sometimes drawing odd glances from residents
Speaker 2: watering their planters or lugging out their bins. Six doors
Speaker 2: in mystery thickens. The houses lacking numbers aren't decrepit or onless.
Speaker 2: In fact, most are respectably kept, with freshly painted sills
Speaker 2: and neat gardens. On two, I press my thumb gently
Speaker 2: into the wood and run a finger beneath the eaves.
Speaker 2: Not a hint of a filled screw hole or paint patch,
Speaker 2: not even a ghostly outline from an old sign. These
Speaker 2: aren't cases of removal. Somehow, They read as if a
Speaker 2: number simply never belonged there. I interview a young mother
Speaker 2: pushing a pram along the path that splits from Maine
Speaker 2: to River's Lane. She laughs when I ask how she
Speaker 2: directs a courier. Oh, they always find it. I say,
Speaker 2: with the apple trees, third before the green barn. That's
Speaker 2: good enough for anyone. She looks at my clipboard with
Speaker 2: tolerant amusement. Maps get confused all the time. It's always
Speaker 2: been that way. The app shows we're eighteen, but gran
Speaker 2: still writes twenty on her Christmas cards. We get them
Speaker 2: either way. Back at the council office, I recall old
Speaker 2: maps in a battered cabinet, oversized sheets, edges, curled and stained.
Speaker 2: There's a nineteen fifty four plan hand drawn every house
Speaker 2: on Main Street assigned a sequential number, including the currently
Speaker 2: unnumbered homes. In a snarl of annotation from nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 2: I find the same. The houses are numbered, no ambiguity,
Speaker 2: as if by definition any house must have a number. Otherwise,
Speaker 2: what is it? I take to digital tools Google street View.
Speaker 2: Being the nosiest of neighbours makes it easy to step
Speaker 2: back through time. Twenty twelve, twenty seventeen, twenty twenty two
Speaker 2: In none of these snapshots does number fourteen or any
Speaker 2: other unnumbered home show a visible plaque or numeral. It's
Speaker 2: like a clean snow has fallen over them each time.
Speaker 2: My impulse is to watch the experts, so I tag
Speaker 2: along with Missus Norley on her post round, her short stride,
Speaker 2: crisp voice. She uses names, not numbers as she sorts,
Speaker 2: her hands hover over envelope's eyes, narrowing with concentration. Each
Speaker 2: door to her is a story in a history, a
Speaker 2: system of memory, not sequence. When asked, she says, comes natural,
Speaker 2: doesn't it? Letters are for missus penfall, not number ten.
Speaker 2: Never lost one yet where there's doubt, knock and ask.
Speaker 2: As the circuit concludes, I stop by the bakery and
Speaker 2: chat to the new delivery driver, Ruvey, dropping off a crate.
Speaker 2: His SATNVE lists each house by number. But on Maine,
Speaker 2: I know the blue door means seventeen, even though it's
Speaker 2: not marked. He can't say why, just that it always
Speaker 2: works out. As for the systems GPS, utility billing, Amazon
Speaker 2: Council Rate, every service points quietly to the same doors,
Speaker 2: referencing the invisible numbers. Online maps generate the correct image
Speaker 2: of the street addresses merge without gaps, and yet in
Speaker 2: the physical world the numbers themselves remain ghosts. At the
Speaker 2: next council meeting, a minor storm irrupts over the suggestion
Speaker 2: that every home must be visibly numbered for future emergencies
Speaker 2: and old timer objects. What was ever wrong with the
Speaker 2: numbers we've always had? But the incomers counter, there are
Speaker 2: houses with no number at all. How will people find us?
Speaker 2: The argument circles, never landing, one side remembering a perfect
Speaker 2: past sequence, the other certain that something essential is missing.
Speaker 2: In a corner, mister Phelps, who styles himself the local historian,
Speaker 2: his hat elbow patched, fitting the roll, digs out a
Speaker 2: seepier plan from a battered case nineteen hundred and five,
Speaker 2: meticulously drawn. The houses are all there, doors and chimneys alike,
Speaker 2: But for some reason, the seat quhen skips from eleven
Speaker 2: to fifteen. Number thirteen is neither struck out nor marked
Speaker 2: as missing, just a quiet leap in the logic of
Speaker 2: the street. It comes to me that evening, after walking
Speaker 2: past a row of houses in dusk light, noting oddly
Speaker 2: a seam of fresh mortar in the wall of one
Speaker 2: unnumbered house, that this gap is neither entirely physical nor historic.
Speaker 2: The oldest records bend to include every house, forcing numbers
Speaker 2: on them as if being numberless is not allowed. But
Speaker 2: no one who lives in them claims those numbers allowed,
Speaker 2: and not one can show me an old sign or
Speaker 2: story about a number removed. My mind turns over the
Speaker 2: matter as I sit with a mug of tea, marking
Speaker 2: up my big map, plotting every unnumbered house from memory
Speaker 2: and from the day's circuit. It strikes me that while
Speaker 2: the pattern looks random at first, the unnumbered entries are
Speaker 2: not clustered haphazardly. Each sits at an interval, rarely adjacent,
Speaker 2: always with at least one or two numbered neighbors flanking
Speaker 2: it like rear shoring bookends, and the cluster traces the
Speaker 2: spine of the oldest lane, the one marked on early
Speaker 2: parish plans as wayfarers walk and now unceremoniously main street.
Speaker 2: The pattern is not just a design quirk or a
Speaker 2: decade's old mistake. I feel myself standing without knowing quite why,
Speaker 2: on the edge of something carefully collectively maintained, a phenomenon
Speaker 2: curiouser and more persistent than paperwork or mere laziness. Not
Speaker 2: a superstition nor a secret, but an absence so perfectly
Speaker 2: upheld that it commands as much attention as anything painted
Speaker 2: in bright official blue. That evening, needing a fresh perspective,
Speaker 2: I invite mister Dowers, the council's favorite outsider, for coffee
Speaker 2: at the cafe overlooking the green. He's perceptive, more so
Speaker 2: than most, perhaps because he still feels the need to ask.
Speaker 2: I recount my findings. I've marked five houses with no
Speaker 2: displayed number. Every system says they have one. But open
Speaker 2: your eyes and nothing's there. How do people give directions
Speaker 2: to your place? He nods, lips twisting oddly. Nobody does, really,
Speaker 2: they say the cottage beside the wisteria gate back of
Speaker 2: the school. When I first moved in, I tried to
Speaker 2: put up a plaque with the number. It looked ridiculous,
Speaker 2: so I took it down again. Post comes all the same.
Speaker 2: He mulls this over for a moment. It's almost as
Speaker 2: if the system everyone really doesn't want those houses to
Speaker 2: have numbers. Not overtly, not like an in joke, more
Speaker 2: like if someone did try to put one up, it
Speaker 2: had somehow just rub off. I can't help, but laugh.
Speaker 2: The phenomenon is not one of accident, but a kind
Speaker 2: of communal consensus by omission. The way people talk about
Speaker 2: it is illuminating. Even the systems, sat navs, online orders,
Speaker 2: council forms integrate these houses with seamless grace, slotting them
Speaker 2: into their hidden numbers, never breaking stride, and yet no
Speaker 2: one utters those numbers outla and no one seems surprised
Speaker 2: when they are absent from the world. Later in the week,
Speaker 2: fellow council member, missus Pembroke, practical to the coreps, surprises
Speaker 2: every one with a throwaway comment during the meeting. Oh,
Speaker 2: the unnumbered houses have always felt a bit in between,
Speaker 2: haven't they? As if the street wouldn't quite work without them.
Speaker 2: Her tone is matter of fact, but in that moment,
Speaker 2: the scale's tip. The missing numbers are not mistakes, nor
Speaker 2: neglected quirks needing mending, but a quiet, persistent pattern every
Speaker 2: one upholds by shared practice, even if no one names
Speaker 2: it plainly. I scribble these thoughts in my note book.
Speaker 2: I suspect now there is a collective maintenance at work,
Speaker 2: a kind of silent choreography that prevents resolution. Is the
Speaker 2: village upholding this gap by tradition, by temperament, or by
Speaker 2: something more essential about the way it knits itself together.
Speaker 2: I feel keenly how the ground of certainty has shifted
Speaker 2: beneath me. Curiosity makes me restless. I begin to ask,
Speaker 2: was this always the way? Is there in some dusty folder,
Speaker 2: a master list, a ledger, or a testimony from a
Speaker 2: past generation who asks these same questions? I ask Missus Norley,
Speaker 2: beloved postmistress of all Tillingford, if she remembers a time
Speaker 2: when each house proudly displayed its number. She rubs her chin,
Speaker 2: purses her lips, and says, some houses just won't keep
Speaker 2: a number. Dear, not for lack of trying. We sent
Speaker 2: around plaques in sixty three, but by next spring some
Speaker 2: just don't stick. Missus Wainwright would know more. Her families
Speaker 2: lived in the same spot back of the green for
Speaker 2: nearly a century. I think she keeps track of that
Speaker 2: sort of thing. The next afternoon, at Missus Wainwright's neat
Speaker 2: ivy draped cottage, I am ushered in with the kind
Speaker 2: of gentle hospitality that suggests the question on my lips
Speaker 2: is not the first of its kind. She moves with
Speaker 2: a cane string of brown beads on her wrist and
Speaker 2: gestures for me to sit at the kit table. I
Speaker 2: hear your asking about the numbers, she says, sliding forward.
Speaker 2: An object swaddled in a woolen tea towel. Unwrapped, it
Speaker 2: reveals itself a battered notebook, its cover layered in old
Speaker 2: scotch tape, edges ragged and stiff from decades of thumbing.
Speaker 2: I call it the catalog, she explains, voice both earnest
Speaker 2: and sly. Not official. Never was family tradition, you might say.
Speaker 2: My late husband's father started it, and before that his
Speaker 2: aunt did the same on scrap paper. It's a private log,
Speaker 2: not council business. But folk who notice odd things sometimes
Speaker 2: come see it. She offers the catalog with a kind
Speaker 2: of pride. The book is a jumble sketches of house fronts, dates, names,
Speaker 2: off hand, narrative in four different scripts, one hand recognizable
Speaker 2: as Missus Wainwright's own key. Dates jump out number twenty
Speaker 2: one missing again nineteen sixty eight, green door house censeous
Speaker 2: man always skips crossed out entries were a house gained
Speaker 2: a number one year, only to lose it three years. Hence,
Speaker 2: when a new resident moved. In interleaved our stories, Missus
Speaker 2: Pegdon always received mail with just her name, and by
Speaker 2: the beech tree. On several pages. Entries show apparent contradictions.
Speaker 2: Sarah Piece children say they lived at seventeen nineteen hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty five. Sixty two photos show no number, neighbors
Speaker 2: marked fifteen and nineteen. I glance up and Missus Wainwright
Speaker 2: is watching closely. Sometimes the council comes with plans to
Speaker 2: fix it all, but somehow the old pattern returns. When
Speaker 2: my Harry's uncle tried to put up a brass number,
Speaker 2: it was gone inside a week, and no one admitted
Speaker 2: to removing it. There's never been any fuss to my knowledge,
Speaker 2: she says, We just keep track for ourselves. My mother
Speaker 2: in law said it made sense in a way. If
Speaker 2: all the houses were fixed and clear, maybe the street
Speaker 2: wouldn't feel like itself any more. I leaf through, finding
Speaker 2: an annotated sketch dated nineteen thirty two. Doorway between bonds
Speaker 2: and pennix vanished before numbering, an elderly hand has scrawled
Speaker 2: never numbered, always remembered. Sometimes a house regains a number
Speaker 2: after a family dies or sells. Sometimes letters addressed to
Speaker 2: an unnumbered house are always delivered regardless the system working,
Speaker 2: not despite the gap, but as if by design around it.
Speaker 2: I ask, if any reason is ever given, are their
Speaker 2: stories ghosts legends to explain it? Missus Wainwright smiles, shaking
Speaker 2: her head. Not ghosts. Now, it's just a way the
Speaker 2: village keeps order. So much changes, but we keep this
Speaker 2: bit uncertain. Don't ask why. There is something almost conspiratorial
Speaker 2: in the way she presses that battered notebook into my hands.
Speaker 2: As I pour over the entries, I understand this is
Speaker 2: not random accident or bureaucratic ineptitude, nor even local superstition.
Speaker 2: This catalog is a structure held not only in memory,
Speaker 2: but in a long standing agreement to live with the unnumbered,
Speaker 2: to tend to the pieces that won't quite fit, to
Speaker 2: know them by heart rather than sign the notebook's spidery lines,
Speaker 2: the practical, loving attention paid across generations. None of it
Speaker 2: is about resolving the irregularity, but rather recording and bearing
Speaker 2: witness a quiet, private ritual. When every official system quietly
Speaker 2: fails to make the world perfectly tidy, the effect upon
Speaker 2: me is immediate, profound. My years of believing every route
Speaker 2: could be rationalized every address systematized, it yields all at
Speaker 2: once to the deep, multicolored logic of people nudging the
Speaker 2: unexplained doorways gently into place, year after unnumbered year. What
Speaker 2: began as a morning's anomaly, a bureaucratic footnote, emerges now
Speaker 2: as a persistent feature of village life. Not an error,
Speaker 2: but a principle, understood, if never proclaimed, a necessary, lovingly
Speaker 2: tended uncertainty at the heart of Tillingford. Missus Wainwright's kitchen
Speaker 2: is surprisingly bright for a house so deeply shrouded in ivy.
Speaker 2: I linger over the battered note book, half way lost
Speaker 2: in the contradiction before me. Every entry not an answer
Speaker 2: but a patient, handwritten refusal to let the mystery resolve.
Speaker 2: It's as if the very act of cataloging the unnumbered
Speaker 2: houses was designed not to pin them down, but to
Speaker 2: keep them safely unpinned, known but never quite fixed. Missus
Speaker 2: Wainwright pours a second cup of tea earl gray, her
Speaker 2: only blend, she says, and nods for me to go
Speaker 2: on reading. Each crinkled page sharpens my curiosity, as if
Speaker 2: the more is recorded, the less becomes certain. A page
Speaker 2: from nineteen eighty three shows a watery pencil sketch of
Speaker 2: the riverland of Main Street. Here a small square is
Speaker 2: inscribed house lost to the willow, not forgotten. I look
Speaker 2: at the spidery line work, remembering my routings along that stretch.
Speaker 2: Have I ever truly seen a willow there or remembered
Speaker 2: a house with it? I can't say. A row of
Speaker 2: numbers runs firmly through the rest of the street, each
Speaker 2: accounted for in the records, the gaps quietly bridging themselves
Speaker 2: on the page while staying blank in the world. When
Speaker 2: I hand the notebook back, she closes it with a
Speaker 2: practiced gentleness. Some things the village keeps watch on, even
Speaker 2: if we don't name it out loud. Missus Wainwright says,
Speaker 2: you see, it's not so much a secret as a habit.
Speaker 2: We care for the oddities because the village feels different
Speaker 2: without them. Her expression is matter of fact, but I
Speaker 2: sense a kind of pride in the incongruity, as though
Speaker 2: her family's stewardship of this quietly impossible record is part
Speaker 2: of Tillingford's essential texture. When I step out into the
Speaker 2: late afternoon, the sky is sifted with high cloud, the
Speaker 2: lanes alive with returning school children. I carry in my
Speaker 2: bag a handful of copied catalog pages. Missus Wainwright insisted,
Speaker 2: so you can keep puzzling. I do not know what
Speaker 2: to call what's growing inside me. It isn't suspicion exactly,
Speaker 2: not the restless urge to expose a trick or to
Speaker 2: fix an error. Rather its adawning fascination, an uneasy marvel
Speaker 2: that so many people, over so many years have lived
Speaker 2: with this ambiguity, not just passively but intentionally. The unnumbered
Speaker 2: houses have not simply been tolerated, They have been tended.
Speaker 2: Driving my slow walk back toward Main Street, I realize
Speaker 2: that every system, spoken or written or digital, manages to
Speaker 2: interface with the unaccountable reality. The numbers are imposed on
Speaker 2: the world in ledgers, input boxes, back in databases, but
Speaker 2: the skin of lived experience, of doors, statements, greetings, lost keys,
Speaker 2: muddy boots, adheres to a structure that never shuts out
Speaker 2: the unnumbered. There is a consistency in this inconsistency, Gentle
Speaker 2: but deliberate. Over the next week, I become the sort
Speaker 2: of nuisance who keeps turning up with notebooks and loose pages,
Speaker 2: pestering neighbors for history. Emma who lives on Rivers Lane,
Speaker 2: answers her door mid bake, flowers smudged along one cheek,
Speaker 2: and laughs when I ask what number her house is
Speaker 2: depends who's asking. On my passport, it's thirty two. On
Speaker 2: the water bill thirty four. But every parcel arrives if
Speaker 2: you just say the old stone stoop by the bakery's yard.
Speaker 2: When I show her a copy of the catalog, she
Speaker 2: flips through and points, look, my mum wrote that in
Speaker 2: We were white rose house once. Then Dad painted the
Speaker 2: roses out and it was just the house with the
Speaker 2: lilac gait. After that, she rummages through a drawer and
Speaker 2: pulls out a faded photograph. Three girls on bicycles, wobbly
Speaker 2: with pride. That's me, just here by the post. No
Speaker 2: number over the door. See, she grins. But I remember
Speaker 2: us having one as kids, or do I? Maybe it
Speaker 2: was the neighbors. She shrugs and offers me a piece
Speaker 2: of short bread. Unconcerned, Her children passing through for snacks
Speaker 2: recite delivery instructions for take away. Never another um, Always
Speaker 2: the gate with the painted fox, the place with the
Speaker 2: blue geraniums. None seem even faintly worried. If anything, the
Speaker 2: looseness feels homely, warmer than all the orderings in the world.
Speaker 2: I press on dogged scribbling a chart comparing catalog entries, deeds,
Speaker 2: council printouts, and local recollections Pattens crisscross. One year, a
Speaker 2: house is documented as number twenty one, and appears so
Speaker 2: in the utility records. A decade later, the very same
Speaker 2: door is remembered by three different neighbors, as Aunt mays,
Speaker 2: the one before the white post, the funny house with
Speaker 2: the low lintel, or simply the one that's just always
Speaker 2: been there. No one disputes the facts. The letters, the meters,
Speaker 2: the taxes all arrive, but every person remembers the house.
Speaker 2: By some shifting sidelong reference begins to feel less like
Speaker 2: a failure of organization and more like the performance of
Speaker 2: something essential, a gentle collective improvisation that no never quite
Speaker 2: permits the world to become too defined. I'm reminded of
Speaker 2: old rituals from my childhood games my sisters and I played,
Speaker 2: where the rules shifted in the retelling. New boundaries allowed
Speaker 2: for the unexpected, the delightful, the nonsense that made things last.
Speaker 2: Only here in Tillingford, the adults continue the game without
Speaker 2: needing to say so. Sitting late at my kitchen table
Speaker 2: one evening, papers arrayed in arcs, I try to build
Speaker 2: a neat cross reference of every house and its supposed
Speaker 2: number since the war. The more detail I add, the
Speaker 2: more the matrix resists. Closure, entries contradict, recollections overlap. The
Speaker 2: village breathes just outside perfect capture. The unnumbered houses shift,
Speaker 2: not literally or perhaps so, but within memory and record
Speaker 2: and routine, as if insisting that to live fully is
Speaker 2: to leave some corners airily, playfully undefined. Still there are
Speaker 2: attempts external official tidy minded. The following Friday, word gets
Speaker 2: around that the council has finally wrangled a county address
Speaker 2: auditor to settle the main street situation. He arrives with
Speaker 2: a tablet, a portable printer, and a determined stride. I
Speaker 2: watch as he inspects each property clip board, bristling with impatience.
Speaker 2: These addresses must be standardized for nine hundred ninety nine response.
Speaker 2: Every house must have a visible sequential number as per
Speaker 2: the code. The villagers gathered in knots of curiosity and skepticism,
Speaker 2: watch him move briskly from door to door hammering up
Speaker 2: shiny adhesive plaques. Where the process reaches a certain whitewashed house,
Speaker 2: the rosemary bush one, the one I first puzzled over.
Speaker 2: The routine stalls. Looks like the spot for number fourteen,
Speaker 2: he mutters, affixing a new blue plaque beside the bell.
Speaker 2: The neighbors nod approvingly. But the next morning I pass
Speaker 2: by on my walk and see the number gone, vanished,
Speaker 2: without residue, without scratch or sticky outline. The rosemary has
Speaker 2: gently filled the gap. The auditor tries again, this time
Speaker 2: with screws and a steel plate. The following day, the plate,
Speaker 2: too is missing, replaced with an unblemished layer of paint. Shrugging,
Speaker 2: he consults the catalog actually my unofficial copy, which has
Speaker 2: circulated fast. He shakes his head. Must be kids or
Speaker 2: some local wind. The houses remain quietly, unmoved, their numbers
Speaker 2: absent the rhythm of daily life. Refusing to break stride.
Speaker 2: At the post office, missus Norley tells me I've known
Speaker 2: four attempts. Now the numbers don't stick on some doors.
Speaker 2: No one admits to touching them, but they never stay.
Speaker 2: You get used to it, she takes pride. I think,
Speaker 2: in the unspoken compact, the shared acknowledgment that some things
Speaker 2: must be organized by presents, not enumeration. Curious to test
Speaker 2: how deep this phenomenon runs, I enlist my friend mister Dowers,
Speaker 2: equipped with more technical optimism than most. We walk Main
Speaker 2: Street with his expensive camera and a location mapping out app.
Speaker 2: Each time we try to photograph an unnumbered house alongside
Speaker 2: the GPS tag, the images refuse to properly save, whether
Speaker 2: through accidental deletion, inexplicable blurring, or pure digital obstinacy. The
Speaker 2: between houses always seem to slip past indexing, just as
Speaker 2: village memories do, just as the catalogs scribbles suggest. Online,
Speaker 2: I inspect the most recent satellite maps and Google street Views.
Speaker 2: Each shows the street continuous, unremarkable. The digital platforms assign
Speaker 2: numbers in their metadata. Fourteen Main Street pops up on
Speaker 2: the sidebar, but on the image, the front door is clean,
Speaker 2: empty of markers. Even the artificial intelligences coach to fill
Speaker 2: in the blanks rather than admit to confusion. Late one night, restless,
Speaker 2: I quiz my home assistant navigate to fourteen Main Street, Tillingford.
Speaker 2: The device responds with the correct route and time but
Speaker 2: when I stand outside the door, there is only stillness,
Speaker 2: no number present, no evidence the device knows more than
Speaker 2: I do. I try send a package to number fourteen,
Speaker 2: then find the house with the rosemary bush, and in
Speaker 2: each case, the system, smooth functioning, slides politely over the gap,
Speaker 2: never raising a warning. If the wires of the village's
Speaker 2: infrastructure know there's something missing, they keep the secret. I return, haunted,
Speaker 2: ever so slightly, to the notion of these houses as
Speaker 2: spaces between. They operate at the boundary of knowing, not neglected,
Speaker 2: not lost, but maintained as unknown. The catalog of Missus
Speaker 2: Wainwright is not so different from the algorithm's silent smoothing.
Speaker 2: Both are forms of gentle, practical accommodation, ways to share
Speaker 2: confusion with grace. Friends and colleagues respond with characteristic mildness.
Speaker 2: That's just how it's always been, says Tom Beadon, fixing
Speaker 2: a loose hinge on his gait. You can't fight every oddity.
Speaker 2: Some just work better left alone. I find myself at
Speaker 2: the village pub one evening, pressed into a crowd of
Speaker 2: residents assembled for the local history society s Memory Night.
Speaker 2: The projector clicks through slides, old street parties, building works,
Speaker 2: snow drifts taller than the lorries that dug them out.
Speaker 2: At the end, I am persuaded to share my findings
Speaker 2: with the room. Curious and perhaps a touch nervous to
Speaker 2: see how the mystery will be received. I tell the
Speaker 2: group about the catalog, about the patterns in the records,
Speaker 2: about the failed numbering on the Rosemary House. People listen
Speaker 2: with interest, but no one seems alarmed. Instead, there is
Speaker 2: an outpouring of anecdotes, of numbers remembered and misremembered, of
Speaker 2: deliveries never missed, of old family jokes about the house
Speaker 2: with not a single digit to its name. Laughter rolls
Speaker 2: across the room. One woman, Claire, raises her hand. Our
Speaker 2: house has never had a number, according to mum. But
Speaker 2: Dad swore we were nineteen at one point. My brother
Speaker 2: says it's seventeen. He wrote it on letters from university.
Speaker 2: They always came some One composes a quick rhyme about
Speaker 2: ten green doors, none with a number, the crowd joining
Speaker 2: in by reflex, not as folklore, but as a local
Speaker 2: living habit. An elderly gent at the back calls out supposed,
Speaker 2: what bothers me is that I don't even care which
Speaker 2: one is right. If the letters arrive, if the friends come,
Speaker 2: that's all the order I need. The room murmurs agreement.
Speaker 2: It is a kind of social spell recited by all,
Speaker 2: never fully transcribed. After the talk, Missus Pembroke finds me
Speaker 2: at the bar, pint in hand. Do you suppose some
Speaker 2: things are just in between? She asks, not quite here
Speaker 2: or there, but necessary for the rest to make sense,
Speaker 2: Like a silence between notes. I think of the catalog,
Speaker 2: the council minutes, the seamless muddling, the arguments, never resolved,
Speaker 2: but always deferred with the usual arrangement. What I thought
Speaker 2: was a hidden failing is instead held together by generations
Speaker 2: of careful forgetting. With my urge to produce a solution undimmed,
Speaker 2: I consult a sociologist at the university, doctor Tarek Sieva,
Speaker 2: a friend of Dowers who has written papers on boundary
Speaker 2: phenomena in rural communities. On the phone, I describe the houses,
Speaker 2: the shifting numbers, the communal resistance to resolution. He listens,
Speaker 2: then offers a possible explanation. Sometimes what a group does
Speaker 2: with an impossible thing is more important than explaining it fully.
Speaker 2: These boundary objects. Your unnumbered houses become a way for
Speaker 2: the group to admit complexity or contradiction without needing consensus.
Speaker 2: He laughs. It's a kind of social grace, a knowing
Speaker 2: wink among those in the know. I hear the term
Speaker 2: generative amnesia for the first time, that uncannyability of a
Speaker 2: community to collectively adjust memory and action to accommodate ambiguity.
Speaker 2: Doctor Siver offers, your village doesn't just tolerate the contradiction,
Speaker 2: it needs it. The anomaly is the glue. Back in Tillingford,
Speaker 2: I bring these theories to the next council discussion. Missus Pembroke,
Speaker 2: mister Dowers, and even the computer wary Misses Norley attend.
Speaker 2: There's a gentle debate, but no real movement. We could
Speaker 2: enforce new numbers, some one suggests, but what will we
Speaker 2: gain really. The council, conscious of the outside auditor's deadline
Speaker 2: but equally wary of losing the character of the village,
Speaker 2: votes in a kind of formal shrug to reaffirm the
Speaker 2: present arrangement for another year, pending further reflection. In an
Speaker 2: attempt at closure, I participate in the drone mapping project
Speaker 2: run by a council. It consultant Naomi. The drone hums overhead,
Speaker 2: capturing the slow bend of Main Street, overlaying data on
Speaker 2: each house. When the images return, they show the expected
Speaker 2: sequence numbered houses, each annotation correct, but at the marked
Speaker 2: unnumbered sites, the overlays hang on the digital photograph without
Speaker 2: referencing anything real numbers fluttering over blank space or perfectly
Speaker 2: generic paint work. The operator frowns houses right there on
Speaker 2: the map, but nothing displays on the wall. Must be
Speaker 2: a rendering bug, may be lighting. The deeper I dig
Speaker 2: the less the anomaly seems to invite solution. Instead, it
Speaker 2: grows in richness and implication. Children learning their addresses for
Speaker 2: the first time skip numbers in their rhymes. Elders tell
Speaker 2: stories of houses shifting, vanishing, reappearing in the ledger without
Speaker 2: ever moving a brick. As the County auditors visit draws
Speaker 2: to a close, his frustration, peeking at the Rosemary Bush house,
Speaker 2: I feel the pattern resolve not into clarity, but into
Speaker 2: a kind of steady moving coherence. The harder the systems
Speaker 2: attempt to finalize the numbers, the more the village slips
Speaker 2: into the habit of avoidance. Giving directions by color tree
Speaker 2: and family, leaving numbers blank at the doorstep. Even the auditor,
Speaker 2: by the third day seems to accept defeat. Well, if
Speaker 2: everyone gets their post, he mutters, heading back to his car,
Speaker 2: the final box on his form ticked with a resigned flourish.
Speaker 2: That evening, over a quiet supper, Missus Wainwright brings me
Speaker 2: a fresh note for the catalog. Rosemary House lost its
Speaker 2: number again for the best. Perhaps she seems amused by
Speaker 2: the recurrence, not at all troubled, as if the world
Speaker 2: were quietly writing itself. What crystallizes through these weeks is
Speaker 2: not merely the persistence of the unnumbered houses, but the
Speaker 2: sense of something communal, generative, and actively shaped in their maintenance.
Speaker 2: The phenomenon isn't passive resistance, but a quietly radical act,
Speaker 2: an insistence practiced over lifetimes on keeping certain spaces unclosed.
Speaker 2: It's during an impromptu gathering to celebrate Missus Norley's forty
Speaker 2: years at the post office that the realization lands most firmly.
Speaker 2: Some one proposes a toast to all the villagers who
Speaker 2: never lose their place, even if nobody can call out
Speaker 2: the right number. Laughter goes around. I watch, as a
Speaker 2: teenager perched on the windowsill, asks, wouldn't it be easier
Speaker 2: if we numbered them all for good? Missus Norley shakes
Speaker 2: her head with a twinkle. Ah, then we'd lose half
Speaker 2: the stories and all the games. Who'd want to live
Speaker 2: in a village where nothing could go missing or be
Speaker 2: found by accident? The sociologist visiting that week weighs in
Speaker 2: between bites of sponge cake. What's remarkable is not the
Speaker 2: persistence of confusion, but the community's willingness to host it
Speaker 2: almost purposefully. You all recognize something old in this, whether
Speaker 2: you recall the details or not. Missus Pembroke in her
Speaker 2: cardigan and practical shoes adds with rare quiet feeling. The
Speaker 2: village is a kind of patchwork. If you stitch everything
Speaker 2: up too tightly, it loses its give. The gaps are
Speaker 2: where the stretch comes in, aren't they? Someone else mentions
Speaker 2: funny though those houses they always look just the same
Speaker 2: year to year, decade to decade, even when the numbers change.
Speaker 2: Everywhere else, That comment lingers unchallenged and content It becomes
Speaker 2: clear then the unnumbered houses are less anomalies to be
Speaker 2: corrected and more vital spaces that allow the community to
Speaker 2: reconcile order with freedom. They exert a mild gravitational pull,
Speaker 2: a necessary margin within which the village remains able to shift,
Speaker 2: absorb newcomers, sustain old family law, and crucially laugh together
Speaker 2: at what cannot quite be held down. The deeper truth,
Speaker 2: the one I would never have suspected back in my
Speaker 2: years plotting logistics for the post office, is this. Tillingford
Speaker 2: is at its most enduring, not through perfect mapping, but
Speaker 2: through its willingness to permit and even cherish, incomplete patterns.
Speaker 2: Its catalog of unnumbered houses is not a ledger of omissions,
Speaker 2: but a living record of how lives, stories and addresses
Speaker 2: can coexist in contradiction without injury. It is not, I
Speaker 2: realize on a morning stroll soon after a refusal of order,
Speaker 2: but a higher form of it, a gentle intergenerational compact
Speaker 2: to leave some pieces fluid, to grant uncertainty a stable place.
Speaker 2: The village, untroubled by its small impossibilities, functions not despite
Speaker 2: the gaps, but through their presence. When doctor Siver passes
Speaker 2: through a last time, he stands with me at the green,
Speaker 2: gazing across the river to the tidy line of Main Street.
Speaker 2: So what will you do with your findings, he asks,
Speaker 2: I surprise myself. I'll keep them, I say, and maybe
Speaker 2: not try so hard to fix the world to the page.
Speaker 2: Some spaces need to stay open. A door unnumbered, a
Speaker 2: lane unnamed, a story admitted as not quite finished. That
Speaker 2: I think is what missus Wainwright meant closing her catalog
Speaker 2: for another season. That is what all the short breads
Speaker 2: and tea and gentle games of avoidance have been rehearsing
Speaker 2: all along. And so as the sun warms the lanes
Speaker 2: and the day settles into mellow order, I take a slow,
Speaker 2: peaceful walk along Main Street, passing the houses, new and old,
Speaker 2: each holding quietly to its own version of being known.
Speaker 2: The retired cartographer in me would once have rushed to
Speaker 2: perfect the list, to pin every number in place, But
Speaker 2: now standing before the whitewashed house, lost again to the
Speaker 2: rosemary bush, I smile. I have learned a sutler, perhaps
Speaker 2: deeper kind of satisfaction, that a map without gaps is
Speaker 2: not a map of any real place. That a village
Speaker 2: where every house is numbered is perhaps a village with
Speaker 2: one less reason to gather and exchange stories. I pause
Speaker 2: before an unnumbered doorway where afternoon light pools golden on
Speaker 2: the split stone step. And think, perhaps every community, however small,
Speaker 2: however interconnected, needs its quiet, unquantifiable spaces, a little ambiguity,
Speaker 2: living and well tended, so that certainty never closes in
Speaker 2: too tightly. As I turn away, warmed by a quietly
Speaker 2: amused curiosity, I remember missus Wainwright's smile. You did well
Speaker 2: to notice, dear, but you don't need to fix it,
Speaker 2: Just watch it turn. Some corners, I now believe, are
Speaker 2: kept not by accident, but with enduring collective grace. And
Speaker 2: perhaps the greatest wonder in any mapped world is the
Speaker 2: gentle persistence of what remains unpinned.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.