Ian McMillan: Something before tea? Try a cup of hot nowt

Then she'd relent and let me get some bread and butter and maybe a biscuit and perhaps a slice of cake and I'd eat them greedily, leaving crumbs of all shapes and sizes all over my grammar school blazer.

Over the years, I've begun to collect those Yorkshire euphemisms, like

Two Runs Round the Table, for the idea of the cupboard being bare; they're part of a shared history of grinding poverty, I suppose, and a response in fat creative language to thin aching bellies.

We were comfortably off when I was a kid and we could afford bread, butter, biscuits and cake and so my mam's "two runs round the table" was part of a folk-memory of hunger in Great Houghton in the 1930s. My wife's family's equivalent of the runs round the table was "ShimShams for meddlers" which paints a picture of something almost surreal.

I'm not sure what a ShimSham is, but over the years I've speculated that it's an odd part of a pig, a bit that might end up on a butcher's floor, or perhaps it's a very rare twilight-coloured vegetable that only turns up in the shabbiest allotments, or maybe even a thick soup that's so peppery it makes you whistle.

Perhaps it had its genesis in some forgotten Yorkshire fairy story about the Fifteen Floppy Mexborough Meddlers who tried to steal the King's food but only ended up with a few shabby ShimShams.

I wonder if I should sell that idea to Disney, by the way? It's a bit light on plot but so is Bambi, and that did well.

I hear these phrases and I write them down, these sharp rejoinders to the innocent question: "What's for tea?" Nowt for Nosies. Whatever tha can catch. A Cup of Hot Nowt. Council Pop. Bread and Scratch. Two bites of't chair leg. Some of them are amazingly poetic: A Cup of Hot Nowt is almost Shakespearian, if you can imagine Shakespeare coming from Halifax. "What are we to drink with our repast, my noble liege?" "A cup of hot nowt, sirrah, with more in the pot if thou needs't it!"

One of my favourites is Lob Skoosh, which my mate Dave Beresford's dad used to say in Thurnscoe in the 1950s when Dave posed the tea question. Dave always thought it sounded exotic and exciting, but it ended up being nothing of the sort; it was usually a thin version of tatie hash, like tatie hash lite.

I was recently in Liverpool and, in a posh restaurant (well, it had knives, forks, spoons, side plates and proper sugar in a bowl) I had

Scouse, which my wife and I had thought was simply an accent or a dialect, but which turned out to be a kind of lamb stew. As I shovelled it in, I dimly recalled that Lob Skoosh was some kind of distant variation of Scouse, which, as I dribbled gravy down my top and left spots of Scouse on the bright white tablecloth, made a lot of sense.

Sometimes, of course, people get the linguistic signals a bit wrong, and they assume there's nothing for tea when there's actually plenty. My mate Chris once came home with me after school and I asked if there was anything we could snack on before my dad made his laborious way home in the Blue Zephyr 6 from the office in Sheffield where he worked.

My mam smiled and said: "Bread and Syrup." Chris said: "I'm sorry, Mrs McMillan, I didn't mean to ask." I took this to be a kind of code for not liking bread and syrup, although who in their right mind wouldn't like bread and syrup?

We sat in awkward silence for a while, pretending to do our homework, and then I cracked and said, well, even if you don't like bread and syrup I'm going to have some, and I got some Mother's Pride and some Golden Syrup from out of the pantry. "Oh, I'll have some of that," Chris said, looking up from a geography textbook that featured plunge pools and basket-of-eggs topography. "I love treacle!"

My amazement hung in the air like thick smoke. "It isn't treacle, it's syrup," I replied, with the air of someone in a pretentious caf

saying, "Those aren't cakes, they're gateaux". When Chris had had syrup explained to him, he revealed he thought it was a word we'd made up because, as he said, "It sounded nothing like a real word". Not like treacle then.

So, go and enjoy your next meal and let's hope it's not Lob Skoosh and ShimShams for meddlers washed down with a cup of hot nowt.