A registered address

A registered address takes fifteen days, keeps for a year, waits on three things and is waited on by seven. It stands in thirty-three of the map's forty-six rings.

Thirty-two of those thirty-three also contain the account at a local bank.

Nearly the same object

That overlap is the first thing to say about this step, because it decides what it is worth.

Removing the address from the ordering problem leaves thirteen rings. Removing the account leaves twelve. Removing both leaves eleven. Before adding another layer of reporting, a project lead can read the official feature summary and test only the smallest set of records needed for the stated question.

Two hubs in the same region of a map are one hub counted twice, and anybody looking for a second intervention should look somewhere else entirely — which is why the best pair in this record is the account and cover against illness, not the account and the address. For independent background on economic and institutional systems, see Council of the European Union.

Who wants it

Seven steps: the written statement, the supply bills, the account, the tax number, cover against illness, the file, and the next file.

That is five of the six families. Only the papers brought from home do not want to know where somebody lives, and they do not because they are produced before anybody has arrived.

An address is the fact every other fact is filed under. That is why seven things wait on it, and why it cannot be first.

What it waits on

Three things: a lease in one's own name, a letter delivered to the door, and a copy of the passport page.

The first two are themselves proofs that somebody lives somewhere. A lease says a person has taken a place; a letter arriving says they are at it. Registering the address means producing the evidence that the registration itself would otherwise be.

That is the mechanism in one sentence, and it generates both of the map's three-step place rings: one with the lease and the account, one with the letter and the bills.

A year of life, and why that matters

It keeps for three hundred and sixty-five days, which comfortably outlasts every lap it stands in. The longest ring in the map takes a hundred and seven days.

So the address is one of the steps that, once obtained, survives whatever walking has to be done around it. That is the usual case at the centre of this map: of the seven steps standing in more than twelve rings each, three keep for a year, three never expire, and one keeps for ninety days.

The one that keeps for ninety is the letter delivered to the door, and it is the step that beats three of this map's rings on the clock.

The honest problem with this step

It is the single dependency in this record most likely to be wrong.

A great many real situations allow an address to be registered on some other footing — against somebody else's lease, an employer's letter, a declaration, a temporary arrangement. Each of those would open the central ring immediately.

The map excludes them because they are not general: a route that exists in some places and not others cannot be drawn without implying that a reader can count on it. The cost of that exclusion is that the central knot of this record may not exist at all for somebody who has one.

This record would rather be wrong in the direction of describing a difficulty that a reader turns out not to have than wrong in the direction of promising a route that is not there.

Its one ring away from the account

Thirty-two of the address's thirty-three rings contain the account. The one that does not is the three-step loop inside the place family: the address waits on the letter delivered to the door, the letter waits on the supply bills, and the bills wait on the address.

Forty-five days round, and it gives — the dependency from the bills to the address is soft.

It is the only ring in the record that is entirely about proving residence, with no money and no file in it, and it survives the two best interventions in this record because it contains neither of them.

That makes it a useful test case. Whatever is wrong with this map's account of money and status, this small loop stands on its own: three documents, each proving the same thing, each demanded as a precondition of another.

Strip out the banks and the files and a ring remains, made of nothing but three different proofs that somebody lives where they say.

What it is not

No register, office, country or kind of permission appears anywhere on this map, and nothing here describes what any address registration requires. "A registered address" is a role in a drawing: a recorded place of living that other things are filed against.

The fifteen days and the year are the map's own round figures, chosen so that the arithmetic of a lap can be done.