Is it just me? Or are you totally over home delivery? asks MARION McGILVARY

Remember when you welcomed Auntie Amazon or lovely Royal Mail with glee? Ooh a present, you’d say joyously, ripping it open for whatever goodie you’d treated yourself to, or, in my case, spiriting it away upstairs to gloat over in secret. Oh happy, happy pre-Covid days, when online shopping was an option to indulge in late at night.

Lockdown has sucked all the joy out of clicking ‘add to basket’. The knock at the door comes several times a day, the package dropped on the doorstep as the delivery guy leaps back into the safety zone and you wearily trek to bring it inside.

There’s no peace. Ding dong, Annoying calling. One is constantly at the mercy of the doorbell lest you are left with the red card of missed delivery doom. It’s a full time job not going to the shops.

And then there is the packaging. Cartons, big enough to house a family of hens, containing only wadded up paper and a tin opener. The plastic bubble wrap, the satanic packing pebbles, the shredded cardboard.

You quarrel with your partner about breaking down the boxes, then break down and do it yourself. Deck the halls with flat pack cardboard and nesting Amazon boxes fa la blooming la . . .

My recycling only goes out once a fortnight. I need another room just for the rubbish. And parcel contents these days are so banal. My last delivery was a mini vacuum cleaner that took me ten minutes to unpack, ten to assemble and two seconds to discover it didn’t work, thus necessitating another inconvenient visit to the Amazon locker.

Dear God of Commerce, roll on Wednesday when we can worship you in store again.