My undercover roll caught on camera

AS ONE gets older, spouses seem to be ever more keen to get us to follow healthier diets.

I like to think I have few dietary vices, bar one — a liking for the sausage rolls made by a household-name fast-food outlet that have become something of a national cliché.

I usually indulged myself when paying a regular shopping visit to the market town of Cowbridge, about 13 miles from home.

The beauty of that location was that I could buy the product and eat it somewhere obscure where my wife was unlikely to see me by accident. All went well for about a year, then I began bumping into friends from our home locality regularly.

One day Claire asked my wife, Chris, why she and her partner Alan kept running into me behind the town hall, of all places.

My wife would have made a brilliant detective anyway, and it only took a nanosecond for the penny to drop.

I once again denied it, of course — obfuscating rather than lying directly.

After all, I took great care to brush away all incriminatory pastry crumbs. I felt I’d got away with it until one fateful evening.

We were half-watching the local television news, on which a reporter was interviewing someone on a street corner adjacent to Cowbridge town hall, when to my horror, lurching into the background was a hunched figure (I had a bad case of sciatica at the time) clearly munching something from a paper bag with the outlet’s logo on.

I felt fate was trying to tell me something and finally called an end to my nefarious snacks.

Colin drury, dinas Powys, vale of Glamorgan.