A few years ago, I accidentally stole a barbecue chicken. Not intentionally. I'm not living some secret life of rotisserie crime. I had simply placed the chicken on the hook at the front of the trolley, forgotten it was there, paid for the rest of my shopping and wheeled my trolley out to the car.

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It was only when I started loading groceries into the boot that I discovered the fugitive chook.

At that moment, I faced two options. The first option was easy: drive home.

The second option was annoying: walk back into the supermarket, queue up, explain my mistake, and pay for the chicken.

I chose the second option.

Not because I feared getting caught. Nobody saw. Nobody knew. Nobody was checking. The supermarket would never have noticed the missing chicken. The cost was insignificant to a large corporation. Returning to pay for it achieved almost nothing measurable.

Yet I knew what the right thing was.

To this day, whenever I tell the story, people react as though I have escaped from a secure psychiatric facility.

They exclaimed: "You went back?" "Why would you bother?" "Do you know how much profit supermarkets make?"

And perhaps they are right. Perhaps it wouldn't have hurt anybody. But that was never the point.

The point was whether I wanted to be the sort of person who knowingly kept something that wasn't mine simply because there were no consequences.

Integrity begins in the moments where nobody is........

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