> My grandmother's house (in Australia) was assigned a house number (in the 70s?) but she refused to use it, continuing to give her address as the house name an

> My grandmother's house (in Australia) was assigned a house number (in the 70s?) but she refused to use it, continuing to give her address as the house name and insisting that we grandkids address letters to her by name. As far as I know they always arrived. -My parents once received a postcard addressed simply to their first names - period. No last name. No street. No town. No postcode. No nothing. It goes to show that: a) Norway is, as such things go, a pretty small country with at least one postal clerk bored enough at work to do a little bit of investigating, and: b) Having a central database in which every Norwegian is required by law to be registered with the address of his or her residence does have its benefits for the less privacy-conscious. (This was pre-internet everywhere, and they were not listed in online yellow pages or similar - so someone must have made a query to the folkeregisteret database along the lines of 'Is there a $male_name which lives with $female_name anywhere in the country?)