The regular Bloopers column in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle says sorry for any errors in the nicest possible way.

Assistant editor Jane Pikett recalls a tale of spelling woe – one that you might not be unfamiliar with…

This story was first published in the Evening Chronicle.

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Names, I mean the spelling of them, cause me more trouble in this job than just about anything else.

Few things irritate people more, and we dropped a real clanger the other day when we managed to change the name of Newcastle’s Lord Mayor mid-way through an article.

Peter Thomson emailed to inform me that we achieved quite a feat when we spelt his name right twice and wrong three times in the same story. Clever, eh?

I know the feeling. Coun Thomson wants to try going through life with a name like mine. Pikett – that’s Pie-kit, not Pick-It, by the way.

Horrible isn’t it? And people never, ever spell it right. I can be standing right in front of them and spelling it out Pik… etc etc, and what do they do? They put a ‘c‘ in the middle. Great.

So, I have every sympathy with Mr Thomson and will do my best to ensure it doesn’t happen again, fingers crossed.

Another name which has caused me some grief this week is Julie Elliott – not because we spelt it wrong but because there are two Julie Elliotts and, you guessed it, we managed to mix them up.

Hence, we printed a photograph of Julie Elliott of the GMB alongside a story about Julie Elliott of Sunderland City Council.

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