What is the 'it'?

… Or were we?

In what was, for me, a new – and, one hopes, not often to be repeated – experience, I was recently called out, in public, as having made a mistake in my book.

I had been invited “upstairs” for what turned out to be an occasion to mark the dubious achievement of my having spent the last 25 years doing the same job. (I have, at least, gotten better at it.)

Addressing the room, someone whom I shall describe as a very senior member of the judiciary in this country (hint: his initials are the same as those of a position he previously held) acknowledged this milestone, read a few lines from the book, and then – I probably should have seen this coming – proceeded to allege that what I had written was, in fact, wrong.

Ouch.

(At least people are reading the book, I guess.)

I had, it seems, misremembered the episode of “Ted Lasso” in which someone – Ted himself, as I described it – says, “It’s the hope that kills you.”

The transcript of the relevant episode, it was then pointed out, makes clear that it is May, the barmaid, who says this to Ted; Ted repeats it on a later occasion, putting on it the very Ted Lasso spin that in his view May was wrong – that it is the lack of hope that kills you.

This might have been the only thing in the book I didn’t fact check, so it figures – proving my own thesis, in a way – that it would be the thing that turned out to be wrong.

But is it really wrong? Ted did say those words. Yes, he was repeating something that had been said to him. But he did say them.

In the narrow (but important) field of endeavour that the book covers, to say that something is “technically right” is to say nothing more than that it is “right”. So I think a case could be made that I wasn’t actually wrong at all.

Technically.