I’m going to do one of those tricks like a magician with a ball and cups, because it is imperative for legal reasons that I don’t say which of the household’s three teenagers was involved in this thing … but on Sunday morning I woke up and there was a wheelbarrow in the kitchen. Cross-examination revealed that some other party had removed it from its original home, but it had ended up in our house because they didn’t want to take it on the tube. Nobody knew whence it had come, so it couldn’t be returned. I immediately suggested we put soil in it and plant vegetables, because that’s what passes for moral guidance in my world. You can strip the fun out of any misdeed if you make the end result boring enough. The counter-suggestion, from the person who definitely didn’t take it, was that we fill it with ice and beer and have one continuous party. There was no plausible compromise between these two ideas, so it currently sits in our front garden, waiting for someone to grab it back off us.
I don’t know when it leaves you, the urge to pilfer things. I would never have stolen a thing with an (individual) owner (a dog, a bike), and I’d never have taken a traffic cone, because it was just too much of a drunken cliche. But when I was young I stole a fire bucket, which was incredibly heavy, being full of sand. I stole a gigantic, very recently cut down log because I thought it would make a good table, but in fact it was kind of still alive and it rotted the carpet, then the floorboard underneath, and, if I hadn’t moved house, would have ultimately, I think, crashed into the room below. I stole a flashing orange light from a building site, and a spoon from British Rail (that’s going back a bit), and a long piece of felt – all of this completely directionless, none of it even as useful as a wheelbarrow. Then, one day, I just stopped. Now I’d be much more likely to leave things in places.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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