What had started out as the gentle inhalation and exhalation of breath on the bobbing seas of slumber had turned into a shipwrecked thunderclap on the reefs of the night.

She was subtle.

A knee in the groin here, an elbow in the ribs there and very soon I was out of bed and padding along the corridor to the spare room, or what is known in our house as the Snoreditorium.

Half awake, I slipped into bed, turned on the radio (for this has happened before) and headed back for Blanket Bay.

But not quite.

For round a headland and over the ether sailed a phrase that struck me as an idea for a column.

I turned over, content, and snored away for the rest of the night.

The next morning I hadn't a clue what I had heard but I do know it was one of those Yorkshire words or phrases which tickle the fancy and stop you ever so slightly in your tracks.

One to admire and reflect upon, to get out, dust down and polish at quiet times.

For instance, I was once admiring a pork pie in the window of a local butcher's shop when I found a gent alongside me doing exactly the same.

We admired its size, its majesty, its varnished pastry case and salivated at the jellied pork within.

He paused.

He considered.

Then he turned to me and ventured: "I am going to invest in a pork pie" and went in.

Note that word. Invest. Not buy or purchase or sample or obtain or acquire or eat (although he most certainly did) and in using the word he gave that pork pie the respect it deserved.

For invest implies profit – and he did when he ate it.

It is also a mark of approval.

You are given a medal at an investiture and I can assure you that the maker of that pork pie deserved a medal.

For, at a decent interval, I also went into the shop and invested in a pork pie. It was worth every penny.

Another phrase I love hearing is that Yorkshire saying that something is "not unpleasant" – one of the best examples of the double negative at work.

My wife uses it when I ask her opinion about something we are eating.

She will pause and reflect and then come out with it.

It's a very subtle graduation of approval, not at all as positive as a straight forward "pleasant." There's nothing gushing about it.

And yet, she's not denying the fact that it might have some merit.

You sense a kind of guarded approval fenced around with Yorkshire caution. There's something held back there.

I used to work with a chap who every now and then was heard to say he was "stuck for bobbins."

It took a while to realise what he meant.

He didn't actually have any bobbins to stick anywhere.

What he meant was that he was temporarily at an impasse at whatever he was doing.

I was going to submit this as another example of a witty Yorkshire phrase although I suspect it may have originated in cotton mills over the Pennines in Lancashire.

In which case it will not do.

Although you have to admit that as a form of words it is not unpleasant...


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