I’m pleased to report that no potatoes have recently leapt inappropriately into breakfast-time exchanges, though sometimes the air is thick with whatsisname and thingummyjig as names drift in and out of availability while the brain-box starts to fire up. Someone ingeniously suggested that ‘potato’ was nearly an anagram of ‘teaspoon’, but perhaps that person spends a lot of time on difficult crosswords.
Lots of people supplied information about angels and legs in art. A most peculiar example that is worth a look is Parmigianino’s ‘Madonna with the Long Neck’. For a more recent case, St Michael is baring his left leg while defeating the devil in Epstein’s sculpture outside Coventry Cathedral. I was reminded that in the eighteenth century not just angels, but kings and noblemen often liked to be portrayed thrusting forward a shapely thigh. On a more serious note, and a far cry from Tiepolo’s more fleshly trios, a famous Russian icon, supposedly by Rublev, depicts Abraham’s three visitors as the Trinity.