Having been 'persuaded' by my younger son to go into partnership on the acquisition of a new PlayStation game - he had the strategic plan, mine was more of a funding role - I found myself in Sutton High Street in South London on Saturday afternoon.
Normally, I try and get any weekend retail missions completed early on Saturday morning, so I hadn't appreciated just how many teenagers there are wandering aimlessly around the shops by about 3pm.
The only group with any real focus was the posse who were loudly and enthusiastically performing Christian rap tunes - not my cup of tea, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves. Jesus is in the House, apparently.
Once the game was secured, I recalled that I needed some stamps. My son took the view that the partnership could now be dissolved, and headed for home rather than join me in the queue at the Post Office.
When I came back into the high street, I found myself walking behind three teenagers - two boys and a girl, aged around 16 at a guess.
One of the boys was noticeable for the fact that his jeans were secured by a belt just above the knee, allowing him to display his blue and yellow boxer shorts to great effect. He was also holding a half-full vodka bottle.
Fair enough, when I was his age I routinely walked the same high street wearing a Stiff Records "If it ain't Stiff…" t-shirt. We all have ill-chosen teenage fashion anecdotes to tell. But that didn't stop me looking at his get-up as he swigged from his bottle, and thinking "tw*t".
So I was not entirely unhappy when two community police officers emerged from between Starbucks and the bike shop and stopped him and his friends. They asked a few fairly reasonable questions - how old were they, what was in the bottle, where did they get it?
Master Pants' response was to shake his impeccably-straightened blond hair petulantly, raise his eyes to heaven with a 'why-are-you-persecuting-me' expression, and exclaim "it's so unfair" in classic teenage style.
This clearly hacked the fuzz off no end, so instead of just confiscating the bottle and giving him a ticking off, they took him and his chums off to a quiet spot to take down their particulars.
No doubt his mum and dad will have been delighted to have been summoned to bail out their boy just as they were settling down to watch Final Score. It would be nice to think they might even be annoyed enough to keep a closer eye on him in future.
Or at least buy him a sturdy pair of braces.