Middle Class Crime Wave sweeps through Haddenham.

Haddenham has fallen. Not to flood, not to fire, but to a crime wave carried out entirely by people who say sorry while doing it. Under the hard white light of the Co-op, a woman in a quilted coat paid for one coffee, held a second cup beneath the spout with the serenity of somebody watering a hanging basket, and walked out into the drizzle with both hands full, apologising to the door as it failed to open fast enough. Three shoppers saw it. Three shoppers nodded at her. That is how it is done here.

Then there are the eggs. Somebody is moving the posh ones into the cheap box. The good eggs, laid by hens with names and dental plans, are being carried along the shelf and tucked in among their own rough cousins like hostages, and the lid comes down, and a man in a gilet stares at the ceiling until the feeling passes. Every carton in the village is now a sealed envelope. You do not buy eggs here any more. You open a small cardboard door and find out what sort of person you married.

The pattern, once you see it, is difficult to unsee. These are not people who need anything. These are men who spent thirty five years on the early train out of Haddenham and Thame Parkway, restructuring the mineral rights of countries they could not spell, and who retired into a converted barn with a wine fridge and absolutely nothing left to conquer. The hunger did not retire with them. It simply came home, put on a gilet, and went looking for a smaller country to do it to, and found the Co-op.

"I eat the pastry while I shop and I present the empty bag at the till," said a man near the bakery, crumbs down the front of his fleece. "I used to move a port. Now I move a croissant eleven metres. I have never once been challenged. I have begun to feel insulted."

The young woman on the till has watched all of it and finds the apologies the hardest part of the shift. She says one man confessed to eating a grape, said sorry for ninety seconds without pausing, then bought a bag of grapes he did not want and apologised again on the way out. Haddenham will go on being the nicest place any of these people have ever destroyed, and the good eggs will go on sitting in the wrong box, saying nothing.