All week at the knees...

WE’VE heard so much about hand-on-knee incidents this week that I’ve been thinking non-stop about knees.

There was Adam Sandler grasping Claire Foy’s knee on Graham Norton in full view of the cameras as though it was some sort of arm rest; Michael Fallon researching journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer’s patella 15 years ago and Damian Green maybe (or maybe not) making fleeting contact with the knee of journalist Kate Maltby in a Waterloo pub. She wrote about it. She was once a family friend. Safe to assume she won’t be on the Greens’ Christmas card list this year.

But what drives men to the knee as opposed to any other bit of a woman’s anatomy – a wrist, a forearm, a shoulder? Obviously there are some areas which are no-go zones in a public place. Only a fool would grab a breast and hope to get away with it. But a knee, while being a gateway to the thigh and therefore moderately erogenous, is also conveniently accessible in a sitting-down-having-a-drinksituation.

Knee patting is ambiguous, hard to read. A pat on the knee can be consoling rather than concupiscent. While a sharp tap on the patellar tendon will release the knee-jerk reflex. And haven’t we’ve seen a lot of that this week?

In Eric Rohmer’s 1970 film Claire’s Knee, a dreamy arthouse pic, a man becomes obsessed with a girl’s right knee. Over the course of a languid, sun-drenched month he tries to find a way of touching her knee without it being badly received, without getting the elbow (as it were). Eventually he achieves his desire.

That was then. Now all men must beware of making contact with the articulating joints of articulate women.