BEACHCOMBER 104 YEARS OLD AND STILL ANSWERING QUESTIONS...

I HAVE been busy this week pondering a key question from a reader. Joan Hunt emailed to ask this: “I was reading about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and wondered how many knights there are now and would this country be big enough to seat them all round a table.”

According to Debrett’s, which knows a thing or two about peers and knighthoods, there are about 3,000 knights and dames alive in the country today. Stories about King Arthur give various estimates of the number of knights around his table, ranging from 12 to 150 or more, so today’s round table would have to be far bigger.

The added problem of social distancing means the diameter needed to seat 3,000 knights and dames would be 6,000 metres. This would necessitate a round table with a diameter of 1,910 metres, about 1.2 miles.

I doubt any room in the world could accommodate such a table, which would cover about 723 acres, so I began to wonder about the feasibility of holding the knightly meeting out of doors. The 42 acres of Buckingham Palace gardens would fall well short but Windsor Great Park covers 4,800 acres, so we could find a location there for the table.

A feasibility study would be needed to establish methods of keeping out tourists, deer and the rain, but such measures should not be beyond our capabilities. At that stage, however, an easier possible solution came to me. Suppose we abandon the idea of a round table with knights on the perimeter and replace it with concentric circles, each two metres further out than the previous one, with the knights and dames accommodated in the circular gaps between them. The monarch would, of course, be at the centre, with six knights in the closest circle around her, each pair of adjacent knights forming, with the monarch, an equilateral triangle with sides of two metres. The next circle would seat 12 knights, then 18 and so on.

Proceeding in this manner, we find that we can seat 3,000 knights at 32 such concentric tables, so the entire array fits into a circle of radius 64 metres to allow for two-metre social distancing. While we would still be pushed to find a room big enough, we could fit it into the Buckingham Palace garden or even Trafalgar Square, if Nelson didn’t object and the buses, lions, pigeons and fountain didn’t get in the way.