The Joy of Getting It Wrong (And Other Accidental Lessons) Because life’s best stories never start with “I nailed it first time.”

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who pretend they’ve never got it wrong, and those who are worth having a drink with. The first group tend to speak in bullet points and wear pastel jumpers draped over their shoulders. The second group are the ones who will tell you about the time they accidentally boarded a train to Belgium when they meant to go to Bath. Guess which group has more fun.

Airports are the great levellers of human dignity. Nobody, however important, escapes unscathed. Business titans are reduced to fumbling with plastic bags of toiletries; seasoned travellers wander like stunned livestock in search of Gate 47B. My own catalogue of airport disasters includes the time I sat serenely waiting for a flight out of Barcelona, reading the Spanish sports pages (to try and learn Spanish, not because I understood it), and then glancing up into the smiling eyes of a lovely local lady throwing words I could barely comprehend at machine gun rate. Mesmerised by the language and her stunning good looks, I almost missed the disembodied voice calmly calling my name over the tannoy like a summons to purgatory.

In the ensuing chaos — the sprint, the pleading with gate staff, the expression on their faces that suggested evolution had taken a step backwards in me — I learned more about myself in that short moment of panic. The lesson wasn’t about time management or attention to detail. It was simpler: you will get it wrong, often, and the world will keep spinning. Sometimes it will even spin you somewhere better than where you intended.

Now, if I’d got it right — if I’d simply boarded the flight on time and unstressed, sat down, and eaten a cellophane-wrapped croissant in peace — I would remember nothing of that day. But because I got it wrong, I can still feel the sweat dripping down my back as I pleaded with the gate attendant, who looked at me with the expression of a person trying to decide whether incompetence is contagious.

And here’s the curious thing: I wouldn’t trade that moment. The memory has outlived the embarrassment. Wrong turns, I realised, have a way of burning themselves into your story far more deeply than anything you do “correctly.”

Paris taught me this again. Armed with a map and unearned confidence, I set out to find a gallery. Thirty minutes later, I was standing in a residential courtyard while a grandmother beat a rug over a balcony, showering me with dust and what I can only assume was centuries of biscuit crumbs. I apologised in broken French, which only deepened her suspicion that I was casing the joint.

Eventually, I gave up on art and wandered into a café where the waiter brought me a coffee so strong it could peel paint. It was, of course, the wrong café. But there I learned more about Paris than any gallery could tell me: the sound of scooters backfiring, the gossip of locals at the bar, the wallpaper peeling in elegant curls like the city itself growing weary under her own expectations. Had I found the right gallery, I would have stared dutifully at the right paintings and come away with nothing but a brochure. By getting it wrong, I met the city.

Not all mistakes are so picturesque. Some take place under the merciless fluorescent light of a British living room. Once, in a fit of optimism, I attempted to install a shelf. The instructions were in Swedish. The tools were blunt. My confidence, however, was sharp. Two hours later, the shelf was on the wall, slightly tilted, as if nodding in agreement with its own absurdity. A week later, under the weight of three hardbacks and a ceramic cat, it detached itself with the commitment of a kamikaze pilot.

Friends now ask about that shelf with the kind of affectionate malice reserved for inside jokes. And here’s the thing: I wouldn’t trade the disaster. Competence is silent. Failure leaves an echo.

Contrast this with perfection, which is sterile, airless, and frankly a bit smug. Imagine living a life where nothing ever went wrong — no missed trains, no wrong turns, no collapsing DIY projects. What stories would you tell? “Well, Margaret, I put up the shelves exactly as planned, and they’re still there.” Riveting. Call the publishers.

The great paradox is that the pursuit of perfection often creates more mistakes. Jeremy Clarkson — a man who treats mistakes not as missteps but as professional strategy — has blown up more vehicles than NATO and somehow became loveable for it. But would we have watched him so religiously if he’d driven carefully at 70mph, signalling properly? Not a chance. His calamities are his charm.

Comedy, too, rests on failure. Chaplin tripping on his shoelaces, Basil Fawlty losing his rag, Del Boy falling through the bar. These aren’t stories of getting it right. They’re reminders that we recognise ourselves most clearly in the pratfall.

There is, however, a darker side to perfection. A life lived with the volume of error turned down to zero would be unrecognisable — and unbearable. Imagine the tedium of flawless days: meetings on time, trains punctual, soufflés always rising, trousers never splitting. It’s antiseptic. It’s beige. It’s the motivational quote section of a stationery shop stretched across a lifetime.

Wrongness, by contrast, is colour. It’s the spice rack. It’s the reason why, when telling a travel story, we skip over the perfectly executed museum visit and go straight to the part where the taxi driver misunderstood the request and took us to a chicken farm on the outskirts of town.

And so, I’ve come to think of mistakes as souvenirs. Each one says: you were here, you tried, and the universe reminded you not to take yourself too seriously.

The point, if one exists, is simple: mistakes aren’t interruptions to the story. They are the story. When we laugh about them, we’re not just laughing at our own ineptitude, we’re celebrating the fact that we dared to do something in the first place.

And if the day ever comes when someone asks me to summarise my life, I doubt I’ll talk about the things I got right. I’ll talk about every trip, slip and fall.

Because those were the moments I was most alive.

And if you can say that — that you lived, and you laughed at the mess — then getting it wrong wasn’t a failure at all. It was the whole damn point.