Ian McMillan: Sugaring the pill as austere times loom ahead

I’m sorry: that was a cruel joke aimed at my Lancashire readers. They’re the ones with the moving lips. I’m sorry again.

The reason I’m making these terrible Lancashire jokes is to distract anybody who might be looking from the fact that I’m trying to nick some sugar.

I’m like one of Fagin’s pickpockets on his first day: I’m rubbish. I pass my hand over the sugar bowl and I make as if to do a digitally accomplished Artful Dodger sachet-grab but a waiter walks by and I thrust my hand back into my pocket.

I try again, and I drop the sachet on the floor; I bend over and scoop it up into my pocket with well-oiled ease. I look nonchalant although I’m sure the waiter saw me. And the other waiter. And that woman over there with the bright red lips and the thick glasses. And that copper who’s come in for a takeaway coffee; I’m sure the waiter is tipping him off about me. And the red-lipped woman is writing something in a notebook. Maybe she’s a private eye.

I’d make a terrible criminal. I’d be one of those who confess to crimes they haven’t committed just in case they commit one and then forget to confess to it because they’re too busy trying to steal sugar. I have to suppress a terrible feeling that the looted sugar is somehow glowing in my pocket, somehow shouting in a tiny sweet voice “Help! I’ve been kidnapped!”

Tony asks what I’m up to. I tell him that I like to pocket a bit of sugar every now and then to take to my mother-in-law so that she can put it in her coffee or sprinkle it on her marvellous apple pies.

I always pathetically justify it to myself by saying that if I took sugar in my coffee I’d have had a sachet anyway. I know: it wouldn’t stand up in a court of law.

Tony shakes his head, his Lancashire head. “Now that’s what I call a Yorkshireman,” he says, laughing. I’m so affronted I almost put the sugar back in the bowl. Almost.

I ask Tony what he means. “Well, that just confirms what they say about people from Yorkshire: they’re tight.” I’m amazed, and suddenly my little act of lifting some sugar from a bowl becomes a moment of mean-ness, of miserly behaviour, of (and I hate the word) tightness.

I think about the times I’ve put hotel soap in my toilet bag, of when I’ve darted like a wading bird on a beach to pick a two pence piece up from the floor. I thought I was just being sensible. Turns out I’m being tight. So now I do put the sugar back.

I aggressively grab the sachet from my pocket and chuck it back in the bowl but somehow it tears and the sugar scatters, and the table top is covered in sweet dandruff. The sweet dandruff of guilt and tightness.

Is the reputation of the Scrooge Tyke justified, do you reckon? Are we misers?

Do we hide round the corner when it’s our round and will we make a pair of pants last just that few years longer rather than buying some new ones just because the elastic’s gone and there are holes in a number of inappropriate places? Well, you call it tight if you like; I call it being careful.

And let’s face it, we’re going to need to be careful in the years to come. We’re entering what polite people call “a time of austerity” and I reckon that’s when we Yorkshire people will come into our own. We don’t like to spend money: that’s fine, there will be no money to spend. We like to turn our vests winter after winter until you can see through ‘em:

Well, that’s a good thing because we won’t be able to afford new vests. In fact, once we’ve turned them so often that they’ve become transparent we’ll stick them in the window frame because we can’t afford new glass.

So we’re prepared for austerity because our tightness was born in tight times. I don’t want to sound like one of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen but the Yorkshire attitude to money was born in poverty, in the grindingly skint streets of the industrial revolution and in the wide open skies and empty purses of the agricultural labourer.

Even in the decade of milk and honey that we just had, a lot of people found it hard to spend because, well, the milk might spill and you might need the honey for tomorrow’s breakfast.

So bring on austerity! I’ve got enough sugar and hotel soap to keep me going till the good times roll again.