Saturday morning, we arrived later than usual for the supermarket rumble, sloe-eyed from having seen off one of our progeny on the cut-price dawn flight.

It was almost afternoon before the beach buggy’s cow-catcher was able to insinuate itself through the cross-traffic of shoppers in the parking area, inflicting minor wounds on the more lethargic.

My wife and I had discussed a game plan on the way. I was to grab a trolley while she hied off to get our lunch in Cold Meats, that being the area of most likely delay. Attendants in Cold Meats, we’ve found, habitually have slower responses than the others. Perhaps it’s the proximity of the fridges.

The trolley I selected seemed sound enough after a perfunctory road test, so I made for the margarine. Then to milk and eggs with a stop betwixt for chicken breasts for an aged bitch. That’s all our Charlie will eat. My wife insists she – Charlie – is allergic to red meat. I maintain the dog is just a lead- swinger with a fowl fetish.

There were only two chicken breasts left so I grabbed them both and moved on to Softwave, toilet and otherwise. Having dumped these items, and a few more wrestled from Soaps and Cleansers, I left the trolley at a previously designated point (Hardware) and made for Frozen Foods.

We don’t normally have much truck with Frozen Foods but it’s a favourite browsing area of mine. I spend minutes admiring the pretty pictures in the vegetarian section, constantly surprised at the myriad and ingenious ways marketers can dress up the lowly soya bean to appear as something else. Thus engaged, I was suddenly aware of my wife, laden with cold meats, salads, cheeses and the Sunday roast.

“Hey!” she said. ‘What’s happened to our trolley?”

I glanced at my watch. It was twelve-fifty, demanding a sprint back to Hardware. The trolley was nowhere to be seen.

“Oh, well,” said my wife. “We’ll just have to start again.”

‘But what about Charlie’s breasts?” I shouted, as I took off down the store.

The question hung unfortunately loud on the air. I could sense strange glances in its wake.

Once more into the melee, with a light shoulder charge on a battalion of women in curlers. It is my conviction that these peak-day shoppers wear curlers like scrum-caps, to protect their ears in the tight-loose and render them more streamlined to boot.

No familiar trolley in Cereals and Coffee, so I decided to work backwards from the check-out counters. Nothing in the queues, Jams and Jellies, Bread and Pastries. But on the edge of a ruck that had formed around a loss leader in Vegetables, I found it: clearly identifiable by the chicken breasts and the margarine.

Since nobody seemed in attendance, and since the ruck was spreading my way, I made both the trolley and myself scarce in Condiments and Sauces. There I started offloading what plainly was not ours – a 10kg bag of potatoes, five packets of salt-and-vinegar chips, enough bully-beef to outlast a siege and a number of articles of a distinctly feminine nature.

I began to feel somewhat like a voyeur, not having considered before how personal supermarket carts can be – and that thought led me to a frantic attempt to disguise the trolley with more bulk chutney than our family could consume in a year.

The next task was to find my wife. En route, I encountered a large lady in a Fair Isle cardigan, loaded down with cut-price vegetables, just as she was announcing to one of the managers that someone had stolen her bloody trolley. It was in my mind to tell her it had been our bloody trolley in the first place, but she was rather heavier and tall with indignation.

When eventually I located my wife, she had another full trolley in tow. Bar the chicken breasts, the chutney and a few other items to which she hadn’t got around, she seemed to have duplicated everything on our list. We made a quick transfer to the new trolley, left the other one and headed for the tills.

I was busy unpacking the last items when my wife said, “Hello! Where are our cold meats and salads?”

They were, of course, where we had forgotten them, somewhere in the bowels of the other trolley. I was half-way in pursuit when it came around the corner, in a company of a large figure wearing a Fair Isle cardigan and the smug look of one who has seen justice done.

I didn’t have the heart to mug the lady a second time. Nor was there any point in going back to Cold Meats. The attendants would already be gone, defrosting somewhere in the sun.

We lunched – with long teeth, to use that marvellous Afrikaans expression – on a tin of bully beef and a packet of diet crackers, both of which I had neglected to ditch the first time.

If there is anything worse than a scratch meal, it is somebody else’s scratch meal.

From John Ryan’s Time Wounds All Heels column