Printing Error

I have just produced a new collection of my poems ("To Dream of Angels", £3 per book if interested), and this morning, reading through a copy before putting a few books aside for a recital tonight, I noticed a printing error.  Nothing too major, just "the the" instead of "to the" - remarkable, though, how a mistake like that involving unimportant words can survive any number of checks and read-throughs!

And then, of course, it leaps out of the page at you so that it becomes virtually all you can see there!

I've put it right, and, as I print my books as I need them, all future copies will have this line correct.  I'm reminded, though, that we live in an imperfect world, and most of the time we have to make compromises and read around the bits that are untidy, uncomfortable or don't quite make sense.  I like the way that Persian carpet-weavers always include a deliberate mistake, because "only Allah is perfect".

Of course, we should always do our best to get things as right as we can.  It's also true that there are flaws and mistakes that really are important, things we can't overlook or live with, but are bound to do something about, whether they are faults within ourselves or within others - so that people do not get hurt, so that the lives of others are not damaged or spoiled.  At present, we're being made all too aware of a situation in which people who should have known better turned a blind eye to the very damaging and exploitative behaviour of a "celebrity".  Few people will come out of that story smelling all that sweet, I suspect.

None the less I'd want also to caution against a small-minded attitude that looks to find faults everywhere, and that then magnifies things that really don't matter all that much (I find myself thinking again of the way my "the the" suddenly leapt off the page), so that they are given more weight and importance than the achievements and the good things.  It can be tempting to do this, but in fact it is a form of tyranny, the more so as we're more likely to be doing it to shore up and massage our own ego than to give help and advice to the person at whom we point our finger.

Life has to go on, people need to work and play together in useful and creative ways, and for this to happen some sense of "live and let live" is vital (and didn't Jesus tell a story about someone with a dirty great plank in his own eye pointing out the speck of dust in someone else's?). Where fault-finding is about putting down rather than building up, we would be better not doing it, and that is certainly true where the faults in themselves are trivial and harmless.