Lynne Truss on a supermarket dilemma Now here's a salutary story. It concerns a middle-aged woman of honest disposition, a well-known supermarket chain, a packet of dried sage, and a "bag for life." I am not saying the middle-aged woman was me, but if I say she had recently contemplated getting a tattoo of her dog's name done on her face, you can draw your own conclusions. Anyway, there she was in Waitrose, happily doing her usual "self checkout" thing with a zapper, and she found that her first "bag for life" was now full. She then opened the second bag and therein - "Oh my GOD!" - found a small packet of Waitrose dried sage that she had bought on a previous visit. Sweat broke out on her brow. "I have already paid for this sage!" she said to herself. My only crime is that I failed to unpack it when I got home! But what do I do now? I have this item in my bag, in the very supermarket of its origin - un-zapped! What do I do, what do I do, what do I do? What to do, though? Once I'd spotted the packet in the bag, I was genuinely confused about what course of action to take. Each idea had its drawbacks. For example, my first thought was: damn, I will have to pay for this again. But if I did this, the packet of sage would have cost me double, which was ridiculous. I then considered the option of finding a member of staff and explaining what had happened - but was this wise? Might they not suspect me of some sort of double bluff? Even if I could prove I had bought a packet of sage on my last visit, I couldn't prove this was the same one, could I? This could be a second packet of sage. I might be sage-mad. And here's another thing: even if I could appeal to CCTV evidence to show that I had not visited the herby area of the shop, wasn't it possible I was working with an accomplice? Looking back, I wish I'd just paid again. But I had a powerful sense that this would, actually, be a dishonest thing to do. It seemed to me that there was a clear distinction between stuff in the shop (which was theirs) and stuff I'd paid for (which was mine). This packet of sage was rightly mine. Even if I had stupidly conveyed it back to the place of its purchase, did that make it less mine? No, it didn't. But while this reasoning was satisfying philosophically, it didn't help much at the scene of the crime (as it were). I've never felt more guilty in my life. I made a big show of zapping a bag of carrots; with affected nonchalance, I dropped it on top of the sage, and then I scurried to the payment machine, expecting at every step the cry of "Stop! Thief! And what I now feel is - well, still guilty, actually; but also quite resentful of the modern world of shopping (with its zappers and bags for life) that created the situation. My only consolation is to sit quietly, in the dark, and sing about my lost innocence, punctuated by the occasional sniff. I had a dream my life would be (sniff) So different from this hell I'm living! So different now (sniff) from what it seemed! Now this packet-of-sage-in-a-bag-mishap has killed the dream I dreamed. Follow Seven magazine on Twitter: @TelegraphSeven