Because sometimes our way isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine as long as we all know where we stand ‘from the off’ so there’s no surprises further down the line. If a job’s worth doing, n’all that.

We also get a bit miffed if anyone pinches our work and ideas as we don’t believe that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. We usually let go of the ‘grey areas’ as we have no choice really, but blatant plagiarism gets our full attention.

It’s not normally our style to be this self-aggrandising and we’re only putting this down in black and white to set-up the punchline, as our black and white approach to right and wrong has gone a little, well… wrong.

We’ve been caught red-handed using an editorial image on our website news page that should have been licensed and paid for through an international press agency – but it wasn’t.

We could go into the whys and wherefores of how it happened but in the end, we let ourselves down by not doing our due diligence – no excuses. We were made aware of this by their legal-eagles, we confessed to our sins immediately and paid-up the usage fee just as quickly.

So why are we telling you this and not keeping quiet about the whole affair? To be fair, I don’t really know other than perhaps we’re looking for redemption. Or perhaps we’ve been on the ‘wronged’ side of the equation a few times recently and we know how it feels.

Either way, we’re taking the positives from the situation to remind ourselves that it’s critical we meet our own high standards and continue to take ownership of our mistakes when they occur.

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Written by David Thompson