IN a supermarket the other day I was putting my shopping on the belt while the young fellow sat in the buggy. Time passed slowly. I watched as my goods moved away, took a couple of steps after them, then noticed that beneath me the boy was busily stuffing every packet of sweets and chocolate coins that he could get his hands on into the space beside him.

"No," I said, as I started the unhappy business of re-distributing his wealth. "We don't do that."

The 'we' was ambiguous, I thought afterwards. It could mean 'we, your family' or it could mean 'we, the members of decent society'. One way or another, it was a moralistic message that I was broadcasting to the world in a regrettable outburst of public parenting. I wanted the people around to know that I hadn't trained him to do this, nor was I using him as a prop in some cack-handed pre-Christmas thievery.

"He gets it from his mother," I said to the woman behind, who thought I was dragging her into a domestic dispute and responded by
grinning wordlessly into middle-distance until we were out of sight.

It was only a half-lie. When she was a child the wife lifted a pack of fruit pastilles from a supermarket and gave them to her mother on the street outside.

"I didn't have to pay," she said with pride, and was disappointed when her mother walked straight back in and handed over the money. Interesting that the knowledge that paying for things is a tedious inconvenience pre-dated the idea that it is necessary.

Some people, of course, never fully embrace that second part. Three girls I know were wandering
aimlessly around the back of a city centre Spar at two in the morning on a Saturday night, when a man carrying a holdall walked in. He hunkered down beside the fridge and transferred every packet of sausages into his bag.

"It's all right, girls," he said with a wink. "It's not a problem." They watched as he walked out of the shop and got into a waiting car.

"That guy…" one of them said a minute later to a staff member, pointing out the door, but then she didn't know how to finish the sentence. There were too many questions. Why sausages? What were they for? Why sausages?

Doing the right thing isn't easy. A friend opened his briefcase at home one evening and found a red squeezy ketchup bottle among his papers. He looked at it in horror, then realised that while doing some reading in a greasy spoon café that afternoon he must have accidentally knocked this object into his bag. So being honest he rang them. The conversation did not go well.

"Hello," he said. "I seem to have
inadvertently robbed one of your ketchup bottles."

"Sorry?" the owner said.

"I took a sauce bottle from your restaurant home with me."

A moment of silence.

"Why did you do that?"

"I didn't mean to. It was a mistake."

"Okay. So what do you want now?"

"Nothing," my friend said. "I'm just letting you know. I'm going to bring it back."

"Don't," the man said. "It doesn't matter."

"I want to," my friend said, and so he did. They didn't thank him.