It’s almost like an illness, the state you can get into checking proofs. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t get feverishly anxious about the commas that have been missed or over-added, the mistypes and mis-spellings? Yesterday I fell into a dither over the inclusion or omission of an e in Acknowledgements. There’s a town nearby which I’ve learnt to spell Bridgwater without an e although I always want to spell it Bridgewater, like the surname of a childhood friend. In our latest book together, I had Acknowledgments without an e until this was queried. This led to panicked googling and more questions and indecision: whether to be old-fashioned or up-to-the-minute, Anglicised or Americanised, and — confusion growing by the minute — which spelling belonged to which option.
In the end, the Acknowledgements on the last page of ‘The Garden of the Grandfather, Life in Greece in the 1960s” has an e, and the whole thing, warts and all, is in the hands of the printers. Any errors still remaining are necessary oblations to the gods in acknowledgment or acknowledgEment that there is no perfection this side of paradise.