Ian McMillan: Hail the newspaper: curtain and companion

Sometimes I've seen the page with my column in it Blu-tacked to a window, so that my grumpy face shines in the morning light as though I'm a stained-glass window in a domestic cathedral. It's like a throwback to some kind of medieval village information board, when gangs of turnip-chewing peasants would turn up outside the church to read bulletins about the health of the king or the situation of the beet harvest. I've yet to see some cheapskate actually reading a newspaper that's been stuck in a window but give it time, give it time.

This got me thinking about the many practical and whimsical uses that newspapers have, often beyond their principal function of dispensing the news and making you think/laugh on a Tuesday. People talk about the long-term decline of the newspaper industry, although I seem to see more people than ever reading them, but let's be honest: when was the last time you saw a window with loads of laptops and iPads stuck in it?

Let's take the wrapping of chips at the fish and chip shop. I know they don't wrap them in newspaper any more, but it's not that long ago that you could eat your tea and get your news (albeit last week's news) at the same time. Again: you couldn't wrap a haddock in a laptop. Well, maybe once. But does your laptop insurance cover vinegar stains and salt damage or a bone in your backspace key?

Thought not. I've seen people swatting flies with a rolled up paper, sweating pensioners wafting themselves cool with a paper, people with mobile phones clamped to their ears hurriedly scribbling an important number down on the margin of the sports page.

In thunderstorms, I've seen people running along with newspaper hats and in hot spells I've seen them holding papers above their heads to shield them from the sun. I've seen boats made from newspaper bobbing and finally sinking on boating lakes and I've seen papers fashioned into tents for dolls and torn into strips and hung on sticks to scare birds away from gardens.

When you've read the paper, it helps to make the fire in the winter; it gets the sticks going better than any firelighter, and sometimes I find it quite satisfying to see a report of Barnsley being thrashed 6-0 going up in flames.

With a laptop or any other electronic way of reading a newspaper, there's only one way to do it. You hold the laptop. You look at the screen and, er, that's it. I'm a student of the way people read newspapers; I've been observing them for years on buses and trains and in parks and often in my own house and the houses of others, and I can tell you that the way you read a paper, particularly a broadsheet like the Yorkshire Post, reflects your personality and tells the observer something fundamental about who you are.

Careful people will fold the paper up as though they're folding the sheets on a bed, sometimes flicking the paper to make sure it folds in a straight line. There's a small sub-section of readers that I call uber-folders: they fold the paper in half, then they fold it again, then they fold it again and again until it's the size of a beermat or a savoury biscuit.

They're determined people, I reckon: they want the paper to obey them and they don't want to be subordinated into what to do by a big flapping sheet. Either that or they've got little pockets. Try folding your iPad five times.

I once saw a chap on a train from Leeds to Burley in Wharfedale carefully reading the paper and cutting articles out with a pair of nail scissors. I was bold enough to ask him why he did it and he said: "I save the words that interest me."

I imagined his house full of interesting words dating back to the Suez Crisis and beyond. My son Andrew is the opposite of the careful folding people, as anthropologists call them: he attacks the newspaper as

though he's on some kind of Speed Origami Challenge. He grabs it and turns it and opens it and closes it and wrestles it to the ground and leaves it for dead. He often does this before I've had a chance to look at it and it makes me grumpy. It's as though the newspaper is a field of virgin snow and somebody's danced in it while I'm still looking for my wellies and my scarf. Some people only read one page. This one,

maybe, or the letters page, or the sport.

So, all hail the newspaper: birdscarer, flyswatter, notebook, almanac, diary, and friend.