It's not big and it's not clever...

It's not big and it's not clever, but the fact is that journalists do tend to swear a lot.

Most of the myths about journos - that we all wear trilbies with cards in the brims and are drunk by lunchtime - are no longer true, I'm afraid, but the idea that we're all pretty foul-mouthed cynics is a bit nearer the mark.

I don't know why swearing is so much of the journalistic culture, but it most definitely is. My dear old ma, having brought me up right and proper, would be distraught if she could hear the way I go on this office, I'd have to say. And the sweariness that abounds in The Journal newsroom does occasionally get us in trouble.

For one thing, there's all the tour parties we get around our building. People are naturally curiously about seeing how newspapers work and we get tour parties coming around The Journal and Evening Chronicle building most days.

Unfortunately, a lot of them are school groups and we do seem to get a few groups of pensioners too. As luck would have it, they all seem to arrive in The Journal newsroom just as I'm in the middle of some gutter-mouthed tirade. It can't be what they're expecting to get from their insight into the world of newspapers.

There's also the young people who come here on work experience and learn nothing that will ever help them in future life but do return to their schools with a much-expanded vocabulary of rude words. Before lunchtime today, I had said the f-word, the s-words and a few other words I probably shouldn't explain in front of a 15-year-old who is in here to learn about journalism this week. If his mother is reading this: I'm very sorry.

Later this year, I will become a father for the first time and will be trying to clean up my act. Maybe I should do the same at work.

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