Wim

One caution about using any of these in writing about a specific product: the words carry an accusation of carelessness, and quite often the size has a boring reason — bundled runtime, multiple architectures in one package, debug symbols nobody stripped, an installer carrying assets for twelve languages.

None of that is bloat in the Wirth's-law sense and the word will be argued with. "Ships a 400MB installer because it bundles a whole browser runtime" is both more accurate and harder to dismiss than "bloated", and it survives the reply from someone who knows why.

There is a real explanation and it has several strands that all point the same way, which is why the behaviour is so consistent across cats.

You are stationary and predictable. Most of the day you move around unpredictably and are hard to be near. In the bathroom you sit still, in one place, for a known length of time. For an animal that likes proximity on its own terms, that is the best available window.

It is a small, enclosed, hard-surfaced room with one entrance. Cats favour spaces where they can see the approach and nothing can come from behind. Bathrooms are, architecturally, close to an ideal cat spot.

Water. Running taps, condensation, a bath, a shower — a room that regularly produces fresh moving water is genuinely interesting to a species that prefers running water to a bowl.

Scent. It is one of the strongest-smelling rooms in the house in cat terms, and much of that smell is you.

So it is not one thing. It is the room where four separate preferences happen to coincide.

The mummified fruit still in the tree is something neither neighbour mentioned and I have definitely been leaving those every year.