Tom cats and the speed of light

This Morning

Ann said something this morning which included the phrase, ‘not last night but the night before’. Into my head popped a poem from a south London school playground of 1954 which I have not thought of since.
Not last night but the night before,
two tom cats came knocking at my door.
I went downstairs to let them in,
they hit me on the head with a rolling pin .
The rolling pin was made of brass,
And I fell down on my fat arse.
I think the ‘arse’ word was replaced at the time by a discrete cough.

Memory

About 6 years ago and still smoking I was obliged to indulge my filthy habit in the garage. To pass the time while puffing I learned Keats poem Ode to a Nightingale by heart and when I could recite it perfectly, word perfectly that is, I put a little slip of paper in the book with the date on. I thought I would go back to the poem in 6 months or whenever I felt like it and see how much I remembered. This way I could observe how memory, my memory, decayed over time. I hoped it would not because I could remember perfectly well ‘Shall I compare they to a summer’s day etc’ which I had learned when I was 14.
After a couple of years the results were pretty good – but now I cannot remember the opening line.

Similarly I learned as a child that the speed of light was 186,000 miles per second and have never forgotten it. But when I actually had to use the speed of light in calculations regularly for a whole year while doing relativity in the OU ‘Space & Time’ course this figure was in meters per second rather than miles per hour. Despite the fact that I used the metric equivalent for a whole year and have never in my entire life had use for the 186,000 mph figure it is only the latter I can remember.