Swinging a cat

I haven't blogged in a while as have been just a little busy working nights for Uncle Rupert and then looking after HP during the day.

I will however, have more time soon as from January 2011 Harry will be doing a couple of days a week in childcare at our local beautifully designed though oddly impractical neighborhood centre/library.

This was going to be a blog on the whole agonising over childcare thing, but I got distracted.

As many of you might know I have a mind that can tend to get caught up running mental calculations of really pointless things.

To illustrate whenever I am on a long distance drive and I pass a sign indicating the distance to a town I cannot help but almost instantly do an estimation of distance divided by speed and then determine an approximate time I'll reach said town giving myself a little mental high five when I get it right. Every town. The whole drive. It's sad, it's odd, I concede it's a little rainmanesque. But I can't help myself. It's compulsive.

And so it was that I was out walking with the boy earlier today and I got to thinking about the phrase 'not enough room to swing a cat'.

As has been pointed out by a friend of mine the place we currently live in is rather small.

A bedsit I believe he called it.

It's not that small, rather a genuine one bedroom apartment would be a fairer description.

In New York it would be called a 2 bedroom flex as any room which does not have plumbing, and within which even the most rudimentary of sleeping arrangements can be made, is fair game as a 'flex' bedroom in the argot of real estate agents.

'Almost a 3 bedroom flex' I thought as there's also a little enclosed balcony. Too little I figured. Even for a New York agent, I mean you couldn't swing a cat in there it's that small.

And so my erratic, though I prefer to think of it as peripatetic, mind took a detour from musing about foreign estate agents in a city I've never lived in and came to be thinking about what it would take to swing a cat and in particular the amount of room required to do so.

Now picture a cat, any cat.


Pick that cat up by its tail and begin to swing it around - in your mind please do not actually pick up a real cat.

For those of you with feline sensitivities feel free to picture a cartoon cat. Garfield for example (And here's a further aside - I'm a dog person - but always found it hard to root against Garfield as he tormented poor Odie. I'm not sure if it was because Odie was so willfully stupid that you felt he kind of brought it on himself or if it was a natural desire to root for the hero of the book that had me grudgingly cheering on a cat over a dog whenever I read the cartoons. Who knows. I'll think on it more and perhaps scrape another blog out of that).

Back to the swinging cat. Now as you swing the cat centrifugal force will do its thing and the little moggie will begin to stretch out.

Quite a ways if you get some speed up.

So you've got the length of your arm, the length of the cat - tail, body, outstretched arms and flailing paws. That would have to be a good metre and a half from your body once you got going right?

So assuming you can keep well centred you'd be covering a circle with a diameter of 3 metres and a radius of 1.5 metres.

Now if my sixth class maths has not evaded me the area our cat is covering would be pi times radius squared or 1.5*1.5*3.14.

That's in excess of 7 square metres or 75 square feet for my American readers (and ain't that strange I've gotten a few hits from over that way, not to mention Mexico, Spain and Russia which is oddly pleasing). It's a pretty fair sized space - in fact over 5 million Hong Kong residents live within less space than that, and you can hire a hotel room that size in Amsterdam for just 44 euro per four hours (thanks Google).

Here's where I left my musings as I'd now arrived home and had more important things to do like change a nappy and play with some blocks but I just thought I'd share.

Keep it in mind for next time someone tells you the space was too small to swing a cat and you too can quickly chip in with 'what less than 7 square metres?'.

ps I'd like to apologise up front for any grammatical, dialetical or mathematical errors. I tend to blog in a rather gonzo unedited style so there's bound to be some mistakes along the way. And I'm too damn lazy to go back and proof check again and again.