I have read Book One in the ‘Sex, Death and Dinner’ pentology sixteen times now. I still love it. It’s out next Friday. It’s all terribly exciting.

The shocker is, after sixteen read-throughs, two rounds of editing and a proofread, I found a sentence starting “An pickled onion”.

“An pickled onion”?

Really?

It’s a kind of screen-blindness. I have been known to swap out ‘the’ for ‘then’, ‘there’ and all manner of ‘those’, but “an pickled onion”?

So, here’s my advice for anyone who might be in my boat – 1) change the font. Sometimes, it’s easier to spot these things when they look different. 2) print it out. Again, sometimes it’s easier to read on paper. 3) my personal favourite: press whatever button you have to get the computer to read it out loud. It can be very tiring listening to all that talk but it’s worth it.

“An pickled onion”. Can you imagine?

Friday 20th July, ‘Sex, Death & Canapés’, Petrina Binney

My pickled onions only come in A’s.