MY friend and I once found a purse lying in the street.

We were about ten and curiosity got the better of us as we opened it up and found some notes and change, along with a pension card.

Even then, mischief-makers that we were, there was no thought of running to the sweet shop and gorging ourselves silly and I suppose there was a certain amount of pride in our hearts as we stood on the lady’s doorstep a few minutes later.

She was suitably impressed, grateful and complimentary about our actions and as she rifled through the notes, we both saw row upon row of jars filled with blackjacks, sherbet and cinder toffee in our minds.

“Well it all seems to be there,” she said, and shut the door in our stunned and crestfallen faces.

You rather hope that Jeremy and Sally Weaving would have been a little more grateful for the return of their misplaced bag at Bournemouth Airport, but the decision was taken out of their hands by the sly individual who found it... and returned it minus their camera.

The cheek of the letter that accompanied the returned bag – signed ‘A good Samaritan... but not that good’ beggars belief, not least for the fact that she thought the Weavings would understand the excuse for her theft.

I would like to think that this is a moral dilemma that doesn’t require too much thinking and that the vast majority of us wouldn’t think about removing an item from someone’s bag as a reward, just because we happened to find it.

But you only have to cast your minds back to TV pictures of the recent riots to make you recall that this is the 21st century.