This morning at 9am I noted that my Amazon delivery had only six more stops before arrival and was planning on delivering between 9.30 and 11.00. A bit later, it was forecasting 10.30-12.30 and only had one more stop to do. It was actually shown as being on the street.

At that point I made the decision to travel to Nottingham to pick it up. Yes, having ordered each item of a three item order to come to Peterborough (after carefully calculating which days I would be here), I pressed the button to purchase everything in my basket. This must have activated the default setting, which is still the Nottingham house, and sent everything to the wrong address. I seem incapable of learning.

Anyway, I have now made suitable adjustments to my details and this shouldn’t happen again.

When we arrived, there was no delivery. The slot had moved on, the van was still nearby and it only had a few more drops before me.

“The driver has to make a few more deliveries on the way to your address” it said.

By the time we left Nottingham at 2pm the time slot had moved round to “Before 10pm” and the van was, again, only a couple of streets away. It was still telling me “The driver has to make a few more deliveries on the way to your address”.

We were back in Peterborough by 4pm. At 5.03pm I had an email to tell me that the packages had been “handed to resident”. Well, I either have a doppelganger, or a burglar, or Amazon is lying.

What do you think?

Just to add to my delight, I am slicing coleslaw by the light of a desk lamp as the starter in the fluorescent tube has broken and we now have no light in the kitchen. Nowhere local that stocks them is open, nowhere that is open stocks them. My sister and Julia have just been on a wild goose chase and are now going to my sister’s house to bring another standard lamp.

What sort of house has a box of various spare bulbs but no replacement starter. If only I’d known about it earlier I could have brought one down from Nottingham . . .

What a night to break down, what an end to the year.