Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

Being an addendum to the previous.

If you are American you may have read the last entry (The Many Wounds of Little George) and decided that I am in need of psychiatric treatment. Or incarceration. Obviously, you may be English, or Japanese, or Russian and have come to the same conclusion. But bear with me.

I lived for a year in Boston, MA., and became something of a connoisseur of minor transatlantic cultural differences.

Obviously, it goes without saying that irony is not one of them (Though there is a kind of earnestness which is more prevalent in the States, but which in the UK is generally confined to members of religious institutions. I remember vividly going into Borders one day in the Atrium Mall on Route 9, dumping my purchases beside the till and being asked, ‘And how are you today, Sir?’. I was not at my cheeriest and said, ‘You’re not really interested, are you?’ To which the reply came, ‘I’m one of the few people in retail who really do care’.)

Putting toilet humour aside, there were two areas where I most regularly put a foot very wrong.

I had not realised the extent to which many British people show affection for one another by being extremely rude. Nor had I realised how difficult it is to explain to someone that the phrase, ‘Three months in boot camp should sort you out’, is a comment one would only make to good friends and is not meant literally.

Nor had I realised that the world doesn’t share the British amusement with stories of pain, mutilation and trauma. There was, for example, a news story shortly after Bonfire Night last year, about a man who given himself serious colonic burns by launching a rocket from between his buttocks. I shared this story with various friends to universal amusement. When living in Boston however, I would sometimes read similar stories online and make the mistake of sharing them with American friends. The usual reaction was one of horror. Partly at the story itself. Partly at my laughter.

(Canadians, I found, were more partial to this kind of thing. Indeed, on one occasion, an American friend laughed uproariously at my story of someone accidentally stapling their genitalia to a plank, or similar, then stopped short and excused themselves on the grounds that they had ‘spent a lot of time with Canadians’).

Many years ago I was a student on a creative writing course, during which the tutor asked us to write a curse poem, addressed to anyone who had particularly annoyed us. We set to the task with gusto and an hour later we read out the poems we had produced. They were, on the whole, rather good, very funny and almost universally good-natured. Then an American man read out a poem about a neighbour whose dog routinely relieved itself on the grass outside his house. It was one of the most frightening poems I have ever heard. I forget the details. But weapons were involved and the neighbour did not live.

Now that I occasionally teach creative writing myself, I habitually steal workshop ideas from tutors who taught me (and hand on my own ideas to other tutors). But the curse poem is one I have decided to leave on one side.

So, to my American readers who have not spent too much time in the company of Canadians, a belated apology for the bleeding man. It was funny, honestly. If you happened to live in the right place.