‘Bugger,’ says my delightful eight-year-old daughter, dancing round my desk. ‘Bugger, Daddy. Bugger, bugger, bugger!’
‘Don’t say that word darling, it’s really unattractive,’ I say.
‘You use it, Daddy. I learned it from Coward on the Beach,’ says daughter, gleefully looking up the offending word, which isn’t difficult, because it’s the second one in the book.
All right, so I swear. Probably more than is good for me. But that still didn’t stop it coming as a nasty shock when, out of the blue the other day, I had an important interview with American Family Radio cancelled on me at the last minute because another of my books — Welcome to Obamaland — apparently contained ‘lots’ of bad words.
‘But what bad words?’ I wondered, seriously flummoxed, because when you’re writing a book for an American audience you always take extra care with your potty language.
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