The Pink star here is the average location of all my days alive. As you can see, it’s located in central Germany, a country I’ve never visited. But this is heavily biased by the fact I’ve spent around 85% of my life living in the UK. The Blue star represents the average location of all the time I’ve spent outside the country I was born and grew up in. This sees a huge shift from Western Europe to Southern Asia. The blue star is actually located in Bangladesh, right on the northern border with India. This star is heavily weighted by the year I spent on student exchange in Singapore, and the two years I spent teaching English in South Korea, and is pulled back towards Europe by my travels there and in North and Central America.

One of the limitations here is that I used the centre point of each country for the GSP coordinates, rather than use the coordinates of every town or city I’ve been to. This will create some inaccuracy, but I think this will more or less even itself out. For example, I’ve only spent time in western Australia, but also only visited the eastern parts of China.

This got me thinking about how to do this more precisely, and while it would be difficult to remember and plot every single place I’ve everbeen, what I can do quite easily is plot the average place I’ve lived. I’ve only ever lived in ten different houses, so working out the locations and time spent in each isn’t too difficult.

The first 18 years of my life are pretty easy. When I was born my parents lived in Wallsend, in Newcastle upon Tyne, in England. When I was two, we then moved to a nearby town called Morpeth, where I lived until I was 18, moving house once. At this point I moved to Brighton to start university. I stayed there for a year until I went to Singapore for a year’s student exchange. I then returned to Brighton to finished my degree. After graduating, I then moved to Yeonhui-dong in Seoul, South Korea, to work as an English teacher. After spending two years there I moved back to Brighton to complete a Master’s degree. After graduating I then spent 15 month living in east London, before moving out to High Wycombe where I’ve been living for the past 20 months.

Using Google maps I was able to find the coordinates of each of the places I’ve lived, and was even able to pinpoint each of my bedrooms! I then weighted each coordinate by the time I spent living there to work out my “average address”. Taking this a step further, I was able to work out the average address for each year of my life: