I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Phil, Asda might have delivered nothing but shoddy treatment and poor customer service for more than 72 hours, but now that your three-day passage to India is finally over, and you've reluctantly accepted your rescheduled Sunday evening grocery order, how does it feel to finally have your shopping?"

Well I wouldn't know. Because it still isn't here. In fact, I'm beginning to think the Asda delivery man is a bit like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.

We stayed at my parents' on Saturday night to celebrate my Dad's birthday yesterday, and with the shopping rebooked for 7-9pm, we were planning to leave there around mid afternoon, coast back along the coast road, and then feast on three-day-old groceries. Unfortunately that all changed at about 11am. I was just getting into my car to take Amelie to the nearest branch of Poundstretcher, when my mobile bleeped. It was a text message from Asda. And it said this:

"Delivery order XXXXXXX8675 has been cancelled due to your payment being declined. Please call us by 10:30pm to rebook for a different day."

Funnily enough, I didn't wait until 10:30pm. To Amelie's displeasure, I marched straight back into the house and phoned India there and then. To cut a long, angry and frustrating story short, the explanation is this:

Asda don't authorise your payment card until the day of your delivery, just before they pick your order. I paid for our original order with my debit card, which had about £200 of available funds on it. Our order was for about £115.

Asda took that payment on Thursday, when the order was supposed to be delivered. Obviously it wasn't delivered, but they didn't cancel it until Friday evening when the shopping was rebooked. And by Sunday they still hadn't processed that refund.

So on Sunday morning, they attempted to charge my debit card again for the 'new' order (which was actually the same order rebooked), but having failed to refund my money from the order they hadn't bothered to deliver, there wasn't enough money in the account to cover it. So the payment failed.

In addition to that debit card, I have a credit card registered on my Asda account, so you'd think that if the first card fails, they might use the second one. At the very least, you'd expect them to phone and ask what I want them to do. But no. If the first card fails, they just cancel the order and send you a text.

I spoke to another lady in India, and like her seven predecessors, she was unable to do anything. Despite the entire situation being wholly their fault, she said there was no way they could deliver our shopping on Sunday. Once an order's been cancelled, it has to be rebooked, and the earliest that any order can be rebooked is the following day.

I pointed out, calmly, and with only slightly murderous intentions, that this order was already three days late, and had now been cancelled PRECISELY BECAUSE THEY'D CHARGED ME FOR AN ORDER I HADN'T RECEIVED, but apparently there was nothing she could do. And nothing her supervisor could do. Or their manager either. In fact, I suspect that had I asked everyone on the Indian subcontinent, I'd have failed to find anyone with enough power to act.

So they rebooked our order for this evening. And while I stomped off to Poundstretcher with Amelie, Lisa phoned the Brighton Marina branch of Asda and demanded to speak to the manager.

She doesn't work Sundays. But they said she'd phone us back in the morning.

She hasn't.

And it gets worse. When I called India on Friday night, the chap gave us a £10 e-voucher as some kind of compensation. That was knocked off our order when it was rebooked for Sunday. Unfortunately, when we got home last night, and I logged into my Asda account, I discovered that because they'd cancelled that order, the e-voucher had been cancelled along with it, and they were now charging us ten pounds more for exactly the same order.

You have to laugh. Unfortunately I can't.