Do you have a pressing problem, annoying anxiety or community conundrum?

Jasminda Featherlight, our resident roving Agony Aunt, is here to help. Jasminda will be responding to questions from our three News Of The Area papers on a rotating basis. This week’s problem comes from Bulahdelah. Send your concerns to Jasminda care of edit@mcnota.com.au and include your title, initials and suburb.

My mother removes the stems from vine-ripened tomatoes so they pass as common ones and cost less. Is this wrong?

Ms VJ, Bulahdelah

I don’t know, VJ. It depends if you think paying for one DVD and shoving the other one up your jumper is wrong.

Or if you think shaking the plastic guide dog Labrador until it coughs up some loose change is immoral.

Look, I’ll admit when you have to use the self-serve stations at the supermarket, it is tempting to weigh your gourmet asparagus as brushed potatoes.

It’s understandable, when they keep running ‘buy two when you only want one’ deals, that you want to engage in some payback.

But you must stop your mother from travelling down the slippery slope of criminality.

I mean it might start as a simple tomato vine extraction, but things can go terribly wrong.

Soon she’ll be hanging with the wrong crowd in aisle three, doing strange things with protein powder and couscous.

Next she’ll be loitering with the weird frozen goods crew.

You know, the ones with frost-bitten hands and icy stares.

You’ve got to call her out, VJ. You can wean her with the ‘free fruit for annoying kids’ if you like, or else go cold turkey.

In fact grab a cold turkey, knock her out and take her 12 items to the express aisle where there’s no temptation, oh, apart from the chocolates, the cigarettes and the chewing gum. Okay, I give up. Just order takeaway.

Carpe diem,
Jasminda.