4 February 2026

A missing delivery presents me with a terrible moral quandary

Tracking down the lost package I feel like a spymaster

Photo by Chiara Bellamoli/Millennium Images

I have been beset by a sense of looming disaster lately. This has not gone away despite last week’s council tax disaster, which has left me holed very close to the waterline. There are further developments in the disaster pipeline. I will keep you posted so you can think – and this is probably this column’s main purpose in life – “There but for the grace of God go I.”

This winter isn’t helping much either. It seems to have been going on for a year and, believe me, when you work from home and yet try to keep the heating off until the evening, you feel every minute you are out of bed. I thought I’d got used to seeing my breath steam indoors when I lived in Scotland but it’s always a novelty. Every few days I have to open the windows because I get tired of the bodily fug that builds up in the home of the bachelor who is not allowed to smoke indoors. I was wondering what it reminded me of and eventually my mind took me back to my childhood. My grandmother lived practically opposite London Zoo and would often take me to it. There, I would inhale, whether I liked it or not, the heady aromas of straw, giraffe dung and elephant sadness.

I tried to lift the mood with some comfort food. Cassoulet always does the trick – or used to when they sold it at Waitrose. Now, believe it or not, the place in the aisles where their cassoulet lived – a tenner a tin, and each tin was enough for two meals – is now given over to Fray Bentos pies and those tins of gammon with a funny shape. It took a while for the ’Trose to be hit by Brexit but it happened in the end.

However, the algorithm on social media found me out eventually; in fact, it must have been reading my thoughts. The algorithm does make the occasional hiccup, such as suggesting I take out a subscription to Yachting Monthly or Horse & Hound. (Neither of which are going to happen. Good God, man, I don’t even have room for a cat here.) But other than that it’s pretty good. So I ordered the cassoulet, sat back and waited. I noticed that the company was using a delivery firm whose name sounds very much like the word “every”, as in “every package we deliver goes to the wrong address” but I ignored my inner forebodings, sat back and waited. I was really looking forward to it. There’s a saying of a certain kind of winter food that people only of my advanced age uses: “It sticks to your ribs.” It is not medically accurate but it has a certain earthy poetry.

I do not need to tell those of you who have used delivery companies in the mid 2020s how things turned out. I was given the tantalising offer of tracking my package, which always makes me feel like a spymaster, tracking agents in the field. Except soon the feeling arises that the agent you are tracking in the field is not so much James Bond as Mr Bean. In the end they brazenly told me that they’d delivered my package. I wonder if I could have fobbed off the council similarly: “I’ve paid it.”

I need not go into the following conversations I had with AI. You have had them too. I tweeted about this, with increasing frustration. This kind of works. You get asked to follow them back and they DM you. Bizarrely, the customer service team then not only “likes” your increasingly enraged posts, it actually reposts them. One suspects either a very frustrated human employee or a very stupid AI bot. I know where my money is. They offered me a refund but told me I would have to download their app first. God knows what that app would have done to my phone.

“No,” I said, “just give me my dinner.”

In the end, and in desperation, I got in touch with the company that sent me the stuff in the first place and they showed me the map and the photo of where Evri – oops, I’ve named them – had, in fact, delivered my cassoulet. It was three streets away. (This is starting to sound like an appallingly first-world problem. I don’t care. For a week, it was also my problem.) Evri had not had the wherewithal to show me this map or photo.

Later, in the dead of night, ie about 5pm, I went to the location: a basement flat that had clearly not been lived in for some time. Mine was not the only package that had been left there. I took the cassoulet and left the other packages to their fate.

I have since spent the week in something of a moral dilemma. Do I claim the refund Evri is offering (£20, plus £5 post and packaging, which is not to be sniffed at)? Or come clean and say, “I’ve found it, no thanks to you”?

Well, like George Washington when confronted with a felled cherry tree, I cannot tell a lie. Not so much because of my innate honesty but my hatred of admin. I often wonder if this amounts to the same thing. So I am using this column to say I have indeed found my two tins of hearty Provençal cuisine, I won’t be claiming my refund, because I do not want to have that on my conscience, and let this be the end of the matter. Except my sense of looming disaster has not gone away.

[Further reading: How to save the English diet]