Legs have been obsessing me lately, as I have been trying to check whether it is really true that most of the increased height of today’s young people is in the legs.
My unsystematic sampling & observation suggests that indeed it is. In fact it has really been quite startling to recognise that there is relatively little variation in the length of the torso of someone of my own or slightly older generation who is well under 5ft 6 inches in height compared with today’s’ young things.
But they do have legs which are very very short compared to those of their children & grandchildren.
My other impression, which I should love to see verified by proper measurement, is that most of the extra length is in the thigh, rather than the calf.
Vernon Scannell expressed so well the wonder at the variousness of things which share the name of leg in his poem from The Winter Man
Legs
Of well-fed babies activate
Digestive juices, yet I’m no cannibal.
It is my metaphysical teeth that wait
Impatiently to prove those goodies edible.
The pink or creamy bonelessness, as soft
As dough or mashed potato, does not show
A hint of how each pair of limbs will grow.
Schoolboys’ are badged with scabs and starred with scars,
Their sisters’, in white ankle-socks, possess
No calves as yet. They will, and when they do
Another kind of hunger will distress
Quite painfully, but pleasurably too.
Those lovely double stalks of girls give me
So much delight: the brown expensive ones,
Like fine twin creatures of rare pedigree,
Seem independent of their owners, so
Much themselves are they. Even the plain
Or downright ugly, the veined and cruelly blotched
That look like marble badly stained, I’ve watched
With pity and revulsion, yet something more -
A wonder at the variousness of things
Which share a name: the podgy oatmeal knees
Beneath the kilt, the muscled double weapons above boots,
Eloquence of dancers’, suffering of chars’,
The wiry goatish, the long and smooth as milk -
The joy when these embrace like arms and cling!
O human legs, whose strangenesses I sing,
You more than please, though pleasure you have brought me,
And there are often times when you transport me.
