tubes onions stealing

 Scaffolding collapsd and ready to depart.

For as long as I can remember I have cultivated Welsh onions. They have the advantage of perpetuity. They look a bit like spring onions, but have somewhat larger bulbs, and grow in clusters. To harvest or to propagate them you  break away part of the cluster, and eat them chopped like spring onions or plant them out. Today I break up the clusters which have been occupying the same bed (vegetable bed!) for several years and set out a new row for next year and fill several pots with extra onions. Oh, and the taste? Better than spring onions, perhaps a little stronger,  more pungent but with a savoury, spicy undertow.

At the checkout in Sainsbury's this morning, I organise my collection of bags, ready for filling off the conveyor. To my surprise I find a solitary lime at the bottom of one of the bags. It is left over from last week's shopping, but I am pricked by a ridiculous feeling of guilt. A security guard looking over my shoulder could accuse me of purloining it. My problem is that I am obsessively honest, horrified by the idea of shop-lifting. But have to ask myself whether such compulsion doesn't mask, an underlying wickedness. If it were not that I feared censor, self-imposed or worse, the censor of others, I might be a natural born thief. Or at least a believer in the dictum that all property is theft.  I simply don't know, but I do remember the warm feeling of triumph when as a child during the war, we scrumped apples, from the school where I was a boarder. "What's this?" said the teacher, pulling back the bedclothes in the dormitory, to reveal the hard-won fruit. That's stealing, she said.