Please Confirm Your Address

Anneke moved in March: four streets, one van, one afternoon. The new place was the top floor of 8 Bristow Street, in Leeds, and she was careful about it. She made a list of everyone who needed the new address — the bank, the electricity company, the dentist, the library — and contacted all of them in a single evening. Then she forgot the whole thing, which is what being careful is for.

In May her bank card expired and the new one didn't arrive. It had gone to her old flat on Cardigan Road, where a student she had never met kept it in a drawer for six weeks. The bank was sorry. The bank also charged her ten pounds for a replacement, and she spent eleven days paying for everything in cash.

In June a man from number 18 knocked on her door. He was holding four envelopes from the electricity company, all with her name on them. The last one said FINAL REMINDER, £64 due, plus a late fee of twelve. Somewhere, at some point, someone had heard “eight” and written 18. Anneke sat on the stairs for forty minutes with the phone against her ear, and at the end of it she gave them her email address instead, because an email address has no house number to get wrong.

In July the dentist sent a card about a check-up, and it arrived. Right street, right house number, completely the wrong postcode — LS4 where it should have said LS6. The postman had brought it anyway, because the postman knows the street.

So three organisations held three different versions of where she lived, and the wrong one was the one that worked.

She rang the bank again to ask how it had happened. The woman on the phone found the form from March and read it out to her. “Please confirm your address,” it said, and under that line, in small letters, was Cardigan Road, and under that was a box.

Anneke had ticked the box. They had never asked her where she lived. They had asked her to agree with them, and she had.