I cannot survive without swearing

Confessions of a chronic potty mouth.

When I left You magazine, they made me a mock-up of a cover featuring me with the K pop band BTS. They called it ‘The Sweary Issue’ and it is crammed with every possible bad word the English speaking profaner could want.

Honestly, this above is still the only part of that cover I can bear to show you. It’s filth. Oh I will also show you the pic they mocked up, which at one point went on to appear in The Times newspaper. Dignity, always dignity.

On top of that, every Christmas at You magazine, we held a joke awards ceremony. And every year of my tenure I received a certificate for being the champion swearer on the team. It was a similar tale at Glamour. ‘You did have a reputation for using the c word,’ says one former colleague from there. ‘If I ever use it now I still think of you.’ 

Is it because I’m Australian maybe? I don’t know, I guess we Aussies have a reputation for being blunt, earthy.. ‘real’. But you Brits are pretty proficient at it too. It’s one of the many reasons I like you so much. Because I really like swearing. I bloody love it. I need it. I’m serious, my body needs me to do it. Those short sharp consonants  - the f with the k, the c blunted off so exquisitely by the t - are the stuff of orgasm-tier catharsis and I can’t give them up. I won’t. Occasionally I have made a concerted effort to stop. Or at least to cut down to maybe a couple of effs and a cee a day. I find it impossible.

For one, I live in London where a person cannot survive the daily assaults on their mental health without calling upon an expletive armory. When the bus driver watches you sprinting and panting to the doors and then closes them right in your face, or that cancelled train sets in motion the chain of events that will screw your entire week, your options are a) quietly vent a few ‘For Fucks Sake!’s to yourself, or b) swallow down on the rage and eventually become this:

And even with my short hair, I can’t pull off that crew cut.

Also I needed to swear - a lot - when I was a magazine editor. It’s a brilliant, glamorous, varied job, for sure. But the days are jammed solid with frustrations, and I found expletives to be the reliable fortification against insanity. Don’t get me wrong, I was never, ever, an abusive swearer at work. It was never of the ‘You fucking moron’ variety. Ever. It was more, ‘OK gang, I’m really fucking stressed that this cover has fallen through, what can we do?’ Or simply, ‘McDonalds for lunch today? Fuck yeah!’. And yes, OK, swearing a lot about which celebrities and their agents we’d decided had been sent to ruin our lives on any given Tuesday.

I love all the swear words. Every single one of them. Over the years I’ve heard of studies here and there that are supposed to prove swearing is a sign of intelligence. I’m not sure that holds, I’m not here to argue for that. But I certainly don’t think sweary people are stupid, either. Swearing isn’t a sign of my limited vocabulary. Far from it. In fact, I take pride in repurposing a range of rude words. For instance, a plain old ‘shit’ to express frustration is even more fun when you turn it into an adjective, ie ‘Oh shitting hell!’. Try it. 

Swear words are absolutely essential for when one is angry, but I will deploy them in all manner of contexts. When I call my dog a dickhead it is said with pride and joy and love. A ridiculous looking ball of hair who tries to get her snacks to fight her? Dickhead.

Dickhead. And Bella.

Backstage at Flackstock the other day, we were thoroughly enjoying the complimentary gin and vodka truck when I found myself chatting to a woman who couldn’t believe she had a drink in her hand and that her two toddlers were far, far away at home. With a big grin, I chinked my cup with hers and said, ‘Fuck those kids!’ and we laughed and drank another. 

Once, when my girl was a toddler and she was screaming at me for no reason, I flipped her the finger behind her back. Except she swivelled round just in time to see it and then later Ross asked, ‘What’s this I heard about “Mummy swearing with her hands”?’ ‘Oh yeah…’ I said with, I hasten to add, a decent amount of shame. ‘ I didn’t mean for her to see that. But she was being a bitch!’. Ross nodded, understanding, but nevertheless I did apologise to Evie for swearing with my hands. I promised to never do that again which I have stuck to. Mostly because she is now an adult and so when necessary I can now do it to her face.

Although, of course the apple does not fall far from the tree and it didn’t take long for Evie to catch on. ‘Daddy’s taking so long at the shops!’ I commented to her one day as we tended to the wholesome activity of making cupcakes. While casually swiping a finger through the cake mix bowl, she looked up me with her enormous blue eyes, smiled so sweetly and asked, ‘‘Is he fucking coming back soon, Mummy?’ 

‘Pardon?’ I said, nervously.

Big smile again, ‘Is Daddy fucking coming home?’

She was three. Oh dear god. 

‘That’s your fault,’ said Ross later. Not that it needed pointing out. Although I can’t lie, I was quietly impressed on the day when she couldn’t get my attention after shouting, ‘‘Mummy! Mummy!’ for a few minutes and then suddenly she exploded. Arms raised skyward, she yelled ‘Fuck!’ with unbridled exasperation. It was exactly the right context for an f bomb.

Obviously I know there’s a time and a place. I’m clearly in no position to give lectures on minding your language, but I once felt very uncomfortable at my daughter’s school’s summer fete when her 4th grade teacher started telling me loudly in front of all the kids that she ‘couldn’t be arsed’ with cooking in this heat. I clutched hard on my metaphorical pearls. Teachers are not supposed to say ‘arsed’, especially in front of your kids. 

So I admit that like everyone else, I have a contradictory relationship with swearing.  But what amuses and puzzles me is when people really go off the deep end saying they’re offended by it. To my mind it’s such faux pomposity. 

I’ll never forget once when I was the editor of You magazine, when the team and I had failed to notice the f word in a photo. It was in, of all things, an interiors feature. It was all about ‘gallery walls’ and there was a picture of a wall in someone’s house that was packed, floor to ceiling, with a random assortment of framed photos and drawings. One of those framed pictures was an artfully designed sentence that featured the word ‘fuck’ in a fancy font. I had about 50 letters and emails from people who were ‘FURIOUS!!!!!!!!’ to come across this in their Sunday paper. ‘This is a family paper!!!!!!!!’ they frothed at me in green pen. When you consider that no one really writes letters to papers that much anymore, this was a big strength of feeling about one little ‘fuck’. 

To this day I can’t tell you if I didn’t notice the offending picture, or that I did see it and it simply did not occur to me that it could be a problem. I hope none of the people who complained ever tried to watch Succession. In fact, I’m moved to wonder if the same people have a conniption every time they turn on the telly these days after 9pm. What critically-acclaimed, high-rating TV show doesn’t feature profanity? You can’t even get through a Peloton ride these days without instructor Cody Rigsby promising to ‘fuck shit up’ every time he plays a Britney Spears song. 

Plenty of people even find the c word charming these days, especially when it exits the mouth of a senior citizen. When I hosted Miriam Margolyes in conversation last year for her book tour, more than 2000 good people of Ipswich gathered, gagging for her to say it every chance she got. And every time she did it was met with uproarious glee. In fact, Miriam will happily tell you she makes a killing on Cameo from people who pay to have her swear at them. 

Donna here, the sign language lady, did a lot of swearing her her hands that night.

And yet when Dawn French jokingly, affectionately called Jennifer Saunders the ‘c’ word on stage at the Glamour Awards - not televised, but clips get played on Youtube -one of my fellow school mums had a go at me about it, every time she saw me afterwards, for months. ‘I’m just so surprised to see that from an event for women,’ she said, on repeat. Do women need protection from profanity?  Let equality extend to full vocabulary rights, I say. Especially because it really does upset some men - a lot - to hear ladies swear. I’ll never forget the Mail’s Quentin Letts having a hit of the vapours when Helen Mirren said fuck at the Glamours. But my favourite was when a friend’s crappy boyfriend told her she drank too much and swore too much and she replied with, ‘Oh fuck off and go and get me another drink.’  

All that said, I can absolutely respect people not loving swear words. Yes there are situations where it’s just totes inappropes and it’s beholden upon us in polite society to read the room accordingly.  But I struggle with the idea that people are in any way genuinely offended or even traumatised by rude words. Really? 

Personally I think people like pretending they have an issue with it when it’s convenient. Like the washing machine repair guy who hung up on me when I  - shock - swore at him. He’d done a botch job on our machine, fitted a too small pump into the back and then just strapped it in place with a load of cellotape. This only became apparent on the next use of the machine, which made a river of our kitchen. I thought, under the circumstances, that me saying, ‘Mate, what the fuck?” was quite restrained, but it was reason enough in his eyes to shut the conversation down.  

Admittedly, that’s not the only time that swearing has resulted in me losing my power in a situation. Like I say, if you’re being sworn at, it’s a conveniently acceptable excuse for disengaging from an argument, from any accountability. Even if you have just flooded someone’s kitchen. And being made to feel small over your grubby language can be humiliating. So, when the situation demands it, I’ve learned to be more British in that respect. Swearing tumbles out of me so easily that when I’ve decided to watch my language and instead seethe quietly, more articulately, it can have more impact. ‘Oh god, she is actually really angry about this, we’d better fix it,’ seems to be the effect.   

But I’ll always enjoy swearing. And on the whole, I find it to be a pleasing, tension-easing leveller. I’ll never forget years ago, the terribly posh, rather intimidating older woman I found myself left with at a cocktail party. To make matters worse, we got onto politics, but when she pronounced a certain politician to be ‘a c’, I was charmed. I’d never heard the word delivered with such plummy grandeur. The ice was smashed and we were away.

There was a study done a few years ago that found that people who swear a lot are generally considered more trustworthy, more honest. I think this is probably true in the sense that we’re not acting, we’re not filtering our behaviour and so what you see is what you get. Whether there’s any truth in it or not, I’m not sure. But I do know from experience that, most of the time, if I throw a swear word in here and there, I do find most people tend to visibly relax. It’s like they realise they’re with someone who doesn’t require them to act as someone they are not. 

Studies have also shown that swearing can help a person deal more readily with pain. - every woman who’s ever given birth is surely nodding right now - and that it is a sign of, if not intelligence, at least verbal dexterity.

So if you are someone who really hates bad language, I imagine you haven’t even read this far down. I’m sorry that you don’t like my swearing. But not fucking sorry enough to give it up.