Farewell, my lovely address book. By Penny Hancock

I’m giving my grown-up son a lift to a party. He gives me the postcode but no road name.

‘I need a road name,’ I screech.

‘What?’

‘There has to be a road name or I won’t be able to find it.’

‘You haven’t put Google maps on?’

I hadn’t.

I navigate my town by street name, the shop on the corner, the garage to the left.

I like to exercise the navigational part of my brain, and I like a proper, old-fashioned address.

But addresses are slipping into the vast repository of defunct things, along with DVDs, CDs, handwritten letters with stamps and landlines. And so, by stealth, contact lists on phones are taking over address books.

I recently decided to replace our dog-eared old address book with a smart new leatherbound one.

The old address book is in quite a state. Not every name is recorded under its alphabetical initial. Some are under the surname, some the first name.

Still others are scribbled at random on whatever page was open when we took down a number, mid-phone call. There are doodles, and there are marks in felt-tip, a ring left by a wine glass. The odd coffee stain.

The address book lived by the phone for many years and used to get ‘defaced’ by our young children. Busy and preoccupied, we registered only irritation at the childish scribbles that obscured our contacts.

Today, these scribbles reveal new information about our now grown-up children to me. One daughter, eight at the time, had been attempting to organise what she saw, rightly, as our chaotic system. Always one for order, far from ‘defacing’ the address book, she was desperately trying to sort it out.

‘Please put this on F,’ she has written, with the F of Ferguson (scrawled on the B page) neatly encased in a square box.

And, in the M section, she wrote, ‘Please fill in this space with Ms!’

Living by the phone as the book did, it often doubled as a notepad.

‘RABBITS,’ I have scrawled across one page, with a phone number.

‘Ah,’ my partner remembers, ‘that was when the rabbits were trying to kill one another and we had to contact a rabbit expert.’

This sadly resulted in our having to sacrifice one of the pet rabbits, to save the other one. We found a new home for it. We didn’t strangle it, but it left one of the children without a pet.

Beneath ‘RABBITS’ and the phone number is the word ‘HAMSTERS’.

I ignored this at the time, assuming my daughter was simply practising her handwriting. Now I see she was taking advantage of our harried note about the warring rabbits to make a hint we never took. Poor child never did get her hamster, but the word reminds us of the period in her life when she desired small furry animals more than clothes or spa weekends.

The book contains some poetic addresses: Ferme du Château, Allée de la Gambauderie and Via Olmarello.

There are Streets and Avenues, Vicos and Calles, Rues and Places. Reminders of friends made when we were travelling; promises made to write.

Our address book is a document of our social life, our family history and, of course, the people who have left us.

Flicking through, I realise that quite a few of the names belong to those now departed to the bigger, celestial address in the sky.

Not that all of this is necessarily sad. Seagrass, Trinity Street, was the house my parents, now departed, used to rent every May and October on the Suffolk coast. The address conjures the vision of small children dunking bacon rinds on strings into the water to draw out crabs; the scuttle of claws on wood; the splash as we tipped them back into the sea; the smell of beer brewing; the feel of salt-stung skin.

The house has long since been sold, but the memories conjured by its address live on.

The address book is also a record of a time now altered for ever. ‘Pay by cheque or at shop’ is scribbled underneath a number, reminding us of a time when we shopped with cash in department stores before cards or phones.

The adult children, home for a night, come in as I pore over the old address book.

‘That was Hannah McGreggor’s house,’ Child One says. ‘She gave me my first cigarette in the park. She’s married with three children now.’

The lives of the children’s friends, long since forgotten, emerge again, like photo negatives finally developed and forming a picture.

I can easily punch a postcode into my phone next time my son needs a lift somewhere, of course. But it will not one day take me back to this time and this place, in the way a proper address would have done.

And so I forget replacing it and reinstate the original address book next to the (now disconnected) landline phone, where it will always belong.