It managed less than 20Km in my direction and is currently "Loading"* whatever that is supposed to mean at Bardon Hill (another Amazon site, still in Leicestershire).

Amazon says:
   
I wasn't irritated but now I am. I expected something a bit more fulsome than a qualified 'sorry'. It actually comes over as 'too bad, never mind'.

*and has been "loading" for the last 3 hours

Whenever I've ordered something from Amazon that hasn't shown up next day^* it's because I somehow magically managed to order it from a third party seller instead of directly from or fulfilled by Amazon.

^{* Amazon Prime in USA isn't even next day, but that might just be an east coast thing. I'm sure California has it down to next hour by now.}

It just means it was barcode-scanned on a conveyor belt (or a digital manifest submitted), and is now sitting in a bin or back of a truck awaiting the next leg of its journey.

That's true, but I knew that was the case here; it comes from a firm called PrecisionGeek. 

I But all the promises and failures are Amazon's. Also only bothering to notify me after I'd waited when they must have known it was going to be late much earlier (and probably very likely to be late seeing as the items were in Italy).

So now (20:14) the package has 'departed an Amazon facility Bardon Hill...'

I'm optimistic that this will be a big van doing a series of drop-offs at distribution centres at various points in my direction ending somewhere near Littlehampton (my local depot).

On a totally unrelated topic, I was once told that in the days when homosexuality was illegal, a common coded approach was to ask the time, presumably in a suitably suggestive manner. If the reply came back "12 O'Clock" then that was confirmation of mutual interest. I always thought that the towns Southampton and Northampton could be worked into a similar code; which begs the question of how Littlehampton would fit in. 

On another unrelated note, a friend of mine who went on to great things in Newspaper editorship once worked for the Maidenhead Advertiser which I thought would be a wonderful name for a medieval contact magazine.

I should leave.

OK, since I imagine you're all hanging on every word of this thread...

Gripping. Can't wait to see how it ends.

It's tense. Can't wait 'til it's past tense.

It ends with a late delivery, or a lost parcel.

Eh voila!