We live in a golden age of swearing

Authors’ book tours are often fun but rarely easy. For me the long train journeys are a delight, but on arrival at bookshop or literary festival a doubt mars any pleasant anticipation: what are they expecting? Your likely audience has come for you rather than the book. Maybe that sounds conceited, as I’m hardly A-list, but I do excite a measure of (possibly morbid) curiosity. As to my audience’s interest in the book itself, well, they haven’t read it. It has only just been published. Their attitude tends to be neutral. How do I interest them?

My latest presents me with a particular challenge. As a personal anthology of abuse and invective, Scorn contains some very rude words. Every audience — metropolitan, provincial, radio or television — has different sensibilities. So two or three times a week I must guess on the basis of no prior knowledge how obscene are the words one may use without risk of offence or displeasure.

I get it wrong both ways. London is perfectly relaxed about wanker. Ashbourne, I can tell you, isn’t even ready for tosser; and in the rural Midlands teeth are sucked at cockwomble. Buxton, meanwhile (to my surprise) is entirely ready for fuck (‘Don’t worry, darling, at our age we’ve heard them all before,’ a nice elderly lady told me beforehand). The C word provokes gasps almost everywhere — but whether of excitement or outrage depends on the place and occasion, and you may be surprised to know that Chester was fine with it. My guess (though I won’t be testing this) is that London would not wish to hear the N word, but Matlock would shrug. Being gay I can probably get away with more homophobic abuse than (say) Jeremy Clarkson, and as I adore Virginia Woolf’s ‘the middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror’, I make full use of my licence.