Ian McMillan: Pencils on my mind – I’ve started so I’ll finish...

I sometimes fantasise about what my specialist subject would be if I ever got to go on Mastermind or its Yorkshire equivalent “Plenty Under’t Cap”.

Would I do “Best Fish and Chip Shops of the West Riding” or should I stick with that old favourite “Great Barnsley goals of the last two decades”?

How about “The Biggles Books of Captain WE Johns” (because I know my Ginger from my Bertie)? Or “The Mathematics of the Yorkshire Pudding With Particular Reference to the Lard/Heat Ratio”?

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After much thought and long-term brow-furrowing, I can reveal that my specialist subject would be “Where Yorkshire Folk Keep their Pencils” which is something I’ve been observing for many years on the sly but which came to the front of my mind the other day when I saw a couple of examples of pencil storage that I’d not seen for a while.

The first was a paint-spattered workman in overalls who had his pencil tucked behind his ear; now you used to see this a lot when paint-spattered workmen were more common than they are these days but as far as I can see the keeping of the pencil behind the ear is a dying art.

But this bloke was using part of his head as a carrying device and for that I salute him. And then I went to watch my grandson Thomas playing football and I noted that the ref kept his pencil in his sock. If you ask me, keeping your pencil in your sock is a bit of a hostage to fortune because if you slip in the mud you could get speared, you could get an HB through the fleshy bit of your leg.

After that, I started thinking about other places you might keep your pencil and found that I’d stumbled on a wonderland of hitherto unobserved human behaviour.

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Neat people keep theirs in pencil-cases, naturally. And I’m not being sexist here but it seems to me that girls and women are better at keeping pencils in pencil cases than boys or men are. At school, all the girls had neat pencil cases with words like Fab 208 or The Bee Gees written on them, and I’ve seen young women on trains with the designer equivalent of the school pencil case so the habit is a difficult one to break.

On the other hand, the boys at school kept theirs behind their ear or down their sock depending on whether they were practical or sporty. Arty types like me kept our pencils in our top pockets so we looked cool and intellectual but the trouble was that if the pencil was too long and your neck was too short you got graphite burns on your chin.

The other place I’ve noticed the pencil being kept is in the mouth. Not the whole pencil, of course, making the cheeks bulge; no, I’ve spotted a category of people you’d have to call “nervous” who suck and chew their pencils or, with a combination of nervousness and bravado, play tunes on their teeth with the sharp end.

I can see myself walking towards that scary leather Mastermind chair. My two minutes start now. My brain is full of pencils.

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