DISTRICT LINE -- There's a suited gentleman on our train car who is calling friends and relatives to say someone's going to die.  Other people in the carriage don't know what to do.

"It won't be long now.  She's got a friend with her, but I want you to have her number in case she goes..."

Even I find this hard to listen to.

For others it must be a nightmare.

When we ran a writing course in the Middle East I wanted to use Phil's story tabloid journalism writing exercise... the one about the widowed, drunken preacher who gets caught speeding... and there wasn't much of the story that I could use.  'Preacher'?: No.  'Drunken'?: Ah, no. 

But it took my friend and colleague Rasha to point out that you also cannot talk about death.  So he couldn't be widowed either.

And remarkably, death was mentioned in the short exercise text FOUR times.

Bad luck.

Last week I was working with pan-European teams on a training session.  At one point a lovely Russia woman named Ekaterina was asked to apologise in a mock business situation.  You could see her physically struggle to say it.  It was like she was spitting out food.

So we stopped and I asked about apologising in Russia.  "We don't."

I asked our culture guru about is and she explained.  "It's a very long, round-about process.  It takes a while in that culture."

Interesting.

Good to know.

*** 

So, back to my tube train again.

Sitting across from me -- ignoring the doctor -- is a young Muslim woman in a head-scarf, intently reading Jane Austin's Persuasion.

Which is perhaps a timely reminder of what will grandly call:

Ferrabee's First Principle of Culture
By the time you learn something for sure about national cultures, it is proved incorrect.

/df