Inside Number 0

(Reposted from my Substack newsletter, because I am nostalgic about this blog, and don't want it to lapse entirely)

Anderson Village, yesterday
Alt text: An American theme park version of a cute English village.

Here’s something I came across this week that made me literally weep helplessly with laughter, while sitting in a room by myself. But then, I have been working quite hard lately. Maybe it won’t do anything for you. Let’s see.

For something I was writing, I needed an authentic sounding fake address in a country I don’t know much about. I wondered if there was some sort of online generator for these, and sure enough I found one. I won’t give the name, but if you want to find it and play with it, just search for this proud boast which appears on the front page:

We have spent 3 years collecting data from every country to generate this enormous database.

Wow! That’s pretty impressive commitment to the project. I gave it a whirl… and the address it spat out certainly looked convincing to me. But of course I’ve got no way of judging. And then it occurred to me that a first step, at least, would be to generate a few fake British addresses, and check that they all sounded pretty plausible. As, at this point, I was confident they would. These guys collected data for three years, after all.

Well. I never got to step two. Here’s what their enormous database suggested to me as authentic-sounding addresses in the UK:

2 Scott Common Jenniferstad S60 2PT

734 Yvonne Corner Zacharyberg TR10 8QN

547 Erin Squares New Andyfurt WF9 2JY

22 Wilkinson Overpass East Sebastianmouth BN13 3DN

4 Matilda Via North Emilychester M20 1BT

Studio 189 Freya Ramp Port Jonathanside TW15 3EQ

0 Anderson Village West Aliceland WF10 2A

Flat 48v Harrison Motorway Lake Gary EH4 5LQ

I started laughing as early as Jenniferstad. The weeping began at East Sebastianmouth. The point at which I had to get up and walk around for a bit in case I hurt myself was 0 Anderson Village.

I can’t quite explain why I found them so funny. Partly it’s that it doesn’t seem like an address generator would be all that difficult a thing to make, and these guys spent three years on theirs, and they’re so proud of it… and every single one is so utterly, magnificently wrong, usually in two or three separate ways.

Partly it’s the inclusion of genuine British postcodes, that place the noble city of Jenniferstad, for instance, in the centre of Rotherham.

Partly it was imagining non-British screenwriters cheerfully accepting these, and using them to write their authentic British dialogue:

You’re from Emilychester?! I grew up in Emilychester! Which part?

4 Matilda Via?

“Via”?

Yeah. It’s in the Italian quarter.

Oh right, North Emilychester. I’m a South Emilychester girl. Go Axolotls!

Or

Oh, her? The artist? Yeah I know her. Everyone knows everyone in a little English town like Port Jonathanside. She’ll be at work by now. You’ll find her in one of the nearly 200 studios clustered on Freya Ramp.

But mostly, it was the questions it raised:

Why are there no Roads or Streets? We almost all live on a Road or a Street! How did they get to a point where they included ‘Overpass’ and ‘Squares’ (plural), but not ‘Road’?

What happened to the original Andyfurt? Is it in another country, maybe near Frankfurt, and New Andyfurt was named after it by German settlers? Or was there a terrible disaster in Andyfurt, and New Andyfurt is build on the rubble?

Just how long is Yvonne Corner? There are 734 houses on it! What the hell is it the corner of?

Why is there a house on a motorway? I speak of course of Harrison Motorway, that vital artery that leads to majestic Lake Gary, and one of the few British motorways to have a first name. The house doesn’t have a number, so presumably it’s the only one on the motorway. Then again, no wonder, because someone is living in Flat 48v. So… the house is large enough that it’s now been broken up into at least 48 flats. And at least one of those flats is itself large enough that it’s been sub-divided into… at least 22 lettered sub-flats? Seems like it might feel a touch crowded. I think before long you’d be wishing for a bit of peace and quiet. The sort of peace that you can only truly find in Anderson Village, West Aliceland. Just ask for number 0.