UNWANTED and discarded, serving no purpose other than to draw my magpie eye, an extension lead sits by the window in the office kitchen.

One socket. Metre upon metre of heavy-duty royal blue cable. Hardly an item of exoticness, scarcity or monetary value, but alluring nonetheless.

Think what japes we could have together - shearing a hedge, pressure-washing my bike, vacuuming the car. The lead has lain forlorn and otiose for days. I swear it winks at me every time I make a cup of tea. "Take me with you," it purrs, teasingly invoking the title of one of my all-time favourite Prince songs. Faced with the choice of dismissal on grounds of gross misconduct or a life without my little blue, electrical accessory friend (to paraphrase Scarface somewhat clumsily), I opt for the latter.

It wasn't ever thus. I remember being eight or nine and pilfering sweets from the corner shop - 10p worth or thereabouts. I got away with it. A few years later, my body flooded with hormones, I lifted a fiver from my mother's purse. Again, my collar remained unfelt. The logical progression would have been tenners, twenties, heftier quarry with greater risks and rewards (chiefly adrenalin and the power to buy insane amounts of sweets), but that's where I stopped, rehabilitated by the remorse caused by my transgressions. Opportunistic and entirely unpremeditated they may have been, but that didn't make me feel any less terrible and worthless.

Then I turned a corner as a hedonistic twentysomething. One Sunday evening after a volume of lager which nowadays would probably kill me, I blundered into the realm of the kleptomaniac. Buoyed by my team's victory in a crucial Old Firm match - this was before the footballing authorities came to their senses and brought forward the kick-off to 12.30pm - and surfing an almost masochistic wave of Scotland's favourite lager, I breenged into a classic Mercedes-Benz left unlocked near my flat.

Inebriated to the point of numbness, I then opened the boot and hauled out a canvas carrier containing a bulky unknown object. Unknown, that is, until the following day, when I opened it to behold a folding tubular steel display stand, the kind you see at press conferences on the news. What need did I have of it? None whatsoever. As I said, kleptomania. And aside from the kiss, guitar riff and pint, that was the last thing I stole.

I just made a cup of tea, though. The lead winked at me. I swear it did.