Counting Spoons…

For my birthday this year, my sister in law got me Richard Herring's "Book of Emergency Questions" - basically a list of strange things to ask people when a conversation peters out. I presume this was because she knows my working days are painfully boring and spent among people with no personality, rather than because she finds conversations with me a chore.

Either way, one question in particular has been rattling around in my brain for days. It won't go away.

How many spoons do you think there are in Cairo?

On the face of it, this is a great formula for this kind of ice breaker. "How many [mundane thing] do you think there are in [specific but random area] ?"

But the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.

Initially, I thought it was only fair to make my guess based on what I knew or had to hand, without Googling or using Wikipedia. Adopting this method, I assumed that Cairo was a decent sized city but not as big as London. London has an enormous population - eight million people. There are more people in London than in all of Ireland. London is bigger than the next nine largest British cities put together. It's huge.

So Cairo can't be that big. But still substantial. Call it four million people, at a guess.

Of those four million hypothetical people, some will own spoons. Most people own more than one. But then again, a good proportion of those people will be children, or otherwise spoonless. So my initial guess was…