Hands up if you think what follows was a scam. I was in Paris, flâneuring along contentedly just by the Louvre, when I saw a chunky gold wedding ring lying on the pavement. At the moment that I registered the ring, or possibly a shade earlier, a woman pedestrian coming towards me bent down to retrieve it. “Oh look,” she said, with a suspicious degree of both alacrity and preparedness, “I've found this ring, quelle chance, but it's a man's ring, so you have it.”

She pressed the ring into my hand. I was discombobulated, partly because there was something stagey in her manner, mostly because while my French is good enough to understand what she had said, it does not stretch to saying “let's leave it here on the parapet, so whoever has lost it can find it”, which is what I wanted to say. If I'm honest (and in an ideal world it shouldn't be relevant, but this is not an ideal world), it didn't help that she looked like Tracey Emin after a big night.

So I said nothing, and instead stood there grinning like a fool, irritated that out of a clear blue sky I now had possession of a piece of jewellery I didn't want but felt some responsibility towards, irritated at having been drawn into an alien finders-keepers moral universe, irritated too by what I knew was about to happen.

And here it came. I was the beneficiary of her discovery, said the woman craftily, yet wouldn't it be reasonable for me to make a small cash donation to her, then we could both claim it was our lucky day? She suggested that €10 might cover her part in the affair. At this point I probably should have handed the ring back and told her she found it, she could deal with it, but then if the ring genuinely were someone's wedding band, I decided I was a better custodian of it than she was, because I would at least make some effort to restore it (an effort I am making here and now). I paid her and she left.

Waiting to see if a flustered husband turned up, I took my first proper look at my prize, fully expecting it to fall apart, like something you get by way of consolation at a funfair. But it didn't, it sat there glinting, pleasingly weighty in my palm, hallmarked, worth a great deal more than €10. So although everything about this episode felt like a con, either the woman was the worst trickster in Paris, or she too was a blameless passer-by, albeit an unusually mercenary one, and shame on me. It's a long shot, but if anyone wants to stake a claim, this happened at about 2pm on Friday, May 23, just where the Pont du Carrousel meets the Quai François Mitterrand.

No chessmaster

At the risk of turning this space into an adjunct of eBay, I'm getting rid of my chess computer. It's a Mephisto, good condition, all pieces present and correct, can't find the adaptor though, cost £100 about 15 years ago. I'm fond of it, and yet I believe that entering middle age necessitates the surrender of certain fantasy versions of oneself, and the fantasy in which I'm really a loveable wise-cracking New York Jewish intellectual hustling tourists for five bucks a game at the public boards in Washington Square has got to go. Frankly, this was always a hard daydream to sustain, on account of my not being Jewish, not living in New York and not being any good at chess. Loveable, and indeed intellectual, I leave to others to decide. It's yours for a tenner. Or less if you want; I'm not much of a wheeler-dealer.

Fish battered

My son said he wanted to survey our neighbours at the holiday park in Kent where we have a chalet. Did they prefer, he wondered, cats, dogs, rabbits or fish? (As pets, rather than eating material.) “Homework?” I asked. “Nosiness,” he replied. “That's my boy,” I said.

It turned into a thriller, with dogs just edging out cats 16-15, rabbits garnering a respectable seven votes, and fish floating belly up with a big fat zero. It struck me that you rarely see tropical fish these days, so perhaps HD TV, Sky Plus, Sony, the net and Nintendo have killed off the tankful of smelly water as viable home entertainment. It wouldn't be a surprise.

Target practice

Having said that, fish are preferable to some of the software out there. Police officers investigating school shootings in America are always struck by the exceptionally high hit rate of the psychotic loner gunman, only to discover the killer has spent years honing his grisly skills on highly realistic shooting games. So efficient are these games at desensitising the user while perfecting their accuracy that the US military employs them to train troops for combat. You know how some debates go on and on with no conclusion ever in sight? The debate over the pernicious influence of violent video games isn't one of them.

Times Recommends

• Fragility always gets my sympathy vote
• Double it and you get the real jobless total
• Has al-Megrahi paid his council tax?