How a trip to West Yorkshire reminded me of everyday delights - Ian McMillan

Something happens on the house’s ordinary threshold as Ian locks the door and checks that he’s locked it (and, yes, checks that he’s checked that he’s locked it).

He stops being Ian McMillan, ordinary man on the street, and he becomes Ian McMillan, observer of the world as he heads up the street to catch the bus and then the train and then another train.

Ian’s notebook is in his pocket and, by gum, he’s going to scribble some clog iron in it over the next couple of days!

I don’t know about you, but when I go on a trip all my senses get sharper and I become more alive because I’m taken out of my everyday surroundings.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my everyday surroundings but every now and then it’s good to leave them behind if you can and go and dance in another part of the map.

And so my wife and I got the bus to Barnsley and then we got the train to Leeds, or as it says on the information screens Leeds (Fast) which is what they eat in the morning in Leeds.

A woman on the train tells her friends about her experiences in an Airbnb: "Geoff was amazed to find a washing machine in there,” she says, her voice rising above the rattle of the carriages.

“But I said to him ‘This is an Airbnb, not a B&B; somebody lives here!’ Well, he wanted to come home.”

That’s what I love about public transport: it’s full of the kind of dialogue you can’t make up.

Later, on the train from Leeds to Halifax, the dialogue got even more wonderful and Alan Bennett-esque. A woman and her friend sat opposite each other.

One was knitting and the other one wasn’t. The knitter said: “I always go to Hebden Bridge for my doorknobs” and her friend replied: “My husband never eats a proper meal. He’ll have chicken and chips but then all night he’ll fill up with bags of nuts.”

I’m glad they didn’t look up and see grinning with delight and scribbling in my notebook.

That’s what happens when I get out and about: I become more receptive to the joys and delights of the everyday and I write them down.

Let me emphasise that I’m celebrating this wonderful everyday language, not taking the mickey out of it, and I was even more delighted when the non-knitting woman said of a warm and unpleasantly humid room that it was “foisty”, which isn’t a word I’ve ever heard before and that I assume is a mixture of fusty and moist.

Maybe it’s a word they use all the time in West Yorkshire and it’s never jumped over the linguistic river into South Yorkshire.

Over the 48 hours, I wrote down almost a notebook’s worth of observational jewels: a man walked past our hotel in a black shoe and a white shoe/in a restaurant somebody spilled a glass of white wine and it was like a dam had burst/a man in a trilby went into a cafe and said in a light voice: “The usual, ladies!”

The joy of being elsewhere, eh? And the Piece Hall and Dean Clough and Shibden Hall as well!