Virtuous hypocrites are everywhere

I was amused to read recently that supermarkets were mystified as to the sudden passion for the humble carrot sweeping the nation; more specifically, swiping the screens of supermarket self-checkouts, to the extent that Britons allegedly bought 800 million more of the orange denture-denters last year than they did in 2013. Perhaps shoppers had finally heard the Medieval rumours about them being a cure for sexually transmitted diseases, and with syphilis up 20 percent year on year considered it a convenient and crunchy way to swerve embarrassment at the doctors.

But no, the merch in question wasn’t humble carrots at all, but a flighty fruit much loved by the airheads of Instagram – they were expensive avocados, which wily thieves have been scanning as the cheapest loose vegetable by weight. Senior Criminology lecturer Emmeline Taylor told the Times: ‘I was working with retailers to reduce shoplifting when one major supermarket discovered it had sold more carrots than it had ever had in stock. Unfortunately