Yes, we love our roasties – but have we really explored the spud’s potential as a gift, an aesthetic, a mood?

All I want for Christmas is … the Nairn Museum potato flask. Showcased as part of the Highland museum’s virtual Advent calendar on Instagram last week, it’s a late-18th-century Staffordshire pottery flask – to be filled with strong drink and used to toast a safe journey for a traveller – shaped like a very realistic, knobbly spud, complete with green bits. The benefactor who donated the flask apparently explained it was so ugly that no one in his family wanted to inherit it.

More than 15,000 Instagram likers beg to differ, including me: I desperately covet this beauteous and useful tuber, surely the ideal emotional support accessory for the season’s more trying social engagements. As the museum’s representative explains, the potato was “seen as a very fashionable vegetable” back then, and I think we need to think hard about that: why isn’t it now? It might be the most valuable player on the Christmas dining table (don’t even think about arguing), but it’s cruelly taken for granted. Have we ever considered the potato as a gift, an aesthetic, a mood?

The potential demand that visitors to the US hand over their social media records, or even their phones, opens up a world of embarrassment

As someone with a child in the US, this new Trump threat to scrutinise tourists’ social media is concerning. Providing my user name would be OK – the authorities would get sick of scrolling through chicken pics before they found anything critical of their Glorious Leader – but what if I have to hand over my phone at the border, as has happened to some travellers already? I would rather get deported.

There’s nothing criminal or egregiously immoral on there; I don’t foment revolution or indulge in Trump trolling, tempting as that would be. But my phone does not paint a flattering picture of me. Does anyone’s? Those shiny black rectangles have become contemporary confessionals, and we would like to believe they abide by the same kind of confidentiality rules.