The Right Write Rite

mistake

two mistakes

enormous mistakes upon innumerable mistakes

where to go from here, but toward yet more mistakes?

I read yesterday that the human erring should be followed by 'repeating the error is diabolical.' Where did divine go?

It is possible that reading that was the mistake. It flips the positive homily into the free-market way of getting on better faster more with everything, maximising every leverage against the pushable envelope into the blue of the sky that sets its benchmark in the pipeline outside of the box

Error, of course, comes from the Latin word for straying from the path. To err is to explore; whatever we get wrong is the way towards getting something spectacularly right. Chewing gum is a mistake, he was trying to make a cheap replacement for the rubber on the soles of shoes. (Maybe that's why the sticks have that tyre-tread pattern.) Post-it notes rely on a glue that didn't end up as sticky as the scientist wanted. Microwave ovens still are a mistake - they make the food taste plasticky - but I trust there's some future use that's undeniably right.

A coot this morning landed on the frozen lake as I walked by on the way to work. It fluttered, backpedalled its splash-expecting legs, glid to a stop, and pecked at the ice as if on purpose. I would never have seen such a thing if I had not left London; I didn't leave London on purpose, either. So here I accidentally am, in a situation where I feel the seasons in the trees and not in the changing Poems on the Underground posters, where I know the names of several kinds of duck and sometimes see the kingfisher on the canal. I no longer mistake a coot for a moorhen, no longer take an egret for a heron. I have become the kind of person who owns binoculars because the birds over the field behind our house are fascinating; the elder twitches with long-tailed tits, the cornstubble is stitched with starlings, and over it all is occasionally a peregrine falcon come over from its nest in the cathedral. I have come to a place where the cathedral is the tallest building in view, where the skies are fully open, without deliberate decisions. If this is a mistake, make mistakes.

Tell me it's not the mistakes that take us to where we are. Tell me. I can think of no plans I have made that have gone to plan, save those where the plan itself was the mistake.

Let me tell you, in fact, how I met my wife the first time. I was touring the university halls, collecting sponsorship to have my head shaved clean of its rockstar locks (although I look back and see lampshade more than Dave Lee Roth, another mistake but an off-topic one). She told me then I should not cut it off, that she'd sponsor me to keep it in spite of the names I'd collected so far. I said thank you and went ahead with the shaving anyway.

How about I tell you how I met her for the second time? In a pub, a year later, where I was smoking the Sobranies with the black papers, believing - mistakenly, of course - that this would make me look sophisticated. I may have been wearing a Mr Men t-shirt. She asked for one, wanting to unwrap the tobacco and re-roll it into a Rizla, and I refused on the grounds that this would spoil the magic of the black papers somehow. I am not proud of this. I made the pages of her diary, crossly.

Seven times, it took, of us meeting before I stopped with the mistaken not kissing her. You are allowed seven mistakes, clearly. Or are made of so many. We were out in a rock club, after the final exams of our university careers, with the DJ playing 80s tunes and the sweat condensing on the walls. What I was wearing was too hateful to describe, and it is painful to admit that it was only partly in homage to the 80s style.

She tells me I am mistaken in my belief that we first danced together to La Bamba. If I am mistaken here I want to stay mistaken, for she insists the real answer is that it was Star Trekkin'. I will tell you it was not, just as I tell her, and a mistaken belief believed hard enough will become at least mythologically true. (This is true, of course, for her too.)

One more mistake, one more, and we would have been moving in separate worlds forever, another name on the Friends Reunited list of people who graduated the same year as each other to each other. Nothing more. However factually true this is, I know the inner circumference of her arms, how it matches my ribs, mine hers, with a sureness that knocks this truth into the court of mistakes, of errors, of counterfactuals. I will not tell you that this is a destiny, I will not tell you fate, but I will hold fast to the knowledge that we want to believe in such things, that the mistakes had a purpose in mind. Even if that means our minds are mistaken in their purpose.