AH, finger lacking good. Kentucky Fried Chicken is running out of chicken.

I haven’t eaten KFC for more than half a lifetime and wouldn’t dip my fingers if the colonel himself delivered a steaming bucket to our door, but this would be tricky as Colonel Sanders has been dead since 1980, although don’t go blaming all that chicken he ate as he lived to the ripe, but possibly greasy, old age of 90.

KFC has been forced to close around half of its 900 branches. My first thought was that perhaps mass production of chicken was no longer tenable, and that KFC would now have to stand for Kentucky Fried Chickpeas or something. But according to the BBC website, the fried chicken chain is blaming “operational issues” after switching its delivery contract to DHL.

Without being any sort of an expert, it’s a fair guess that the important part of being a delivery business is to deliver. But, then, we live in strange times when privatised rail companies pull out of delivering people as they’re not creaming in the money as they’d hoped when they rashly flashed their golden-ticket of a proposal past the government’s lazy eye.

Anyway, back to those non-running chickens.

A reporter on the BBC news interviewed young girls about how they were coping without their fried chicken. One of those chosen was a star, although you worried for her future if she ate too many of those fried chicken meals she was missing.

My objection to KFC lies in middle-class food snobbism. I don’t eat anything like that because, well, in this house we just don’t. No takeaways at all. You can take away from that statement whatever you wish. We don’t eat ready meals either, only unready ones, and maybe that makes us unusual.

Trying to keep on top of the latest food advice is always tricky, and the non-arriving chicken story arrives at the same time as the Office for National Statistics reveals that we are eating 50% more calories than we claim in the statistics.

One theory about the calorie self-con is that people who are keen to lose weight are likely to under-report what they eat. But I think we all do that, however much we pretend to calorific saintliness.

Most of us kid ourselves about food. For instance, it is clear beyond doubt to me that a slick of cold unsalted butter on a crust of homemade bread, topped with honey from down the road, contains no calories at all, not a solitary one. I’ll be sticking to that theory through thick and thin. Or possibly the other way around.

One day last week, my wife and me came off a spell of doing the 5:2 diet (veggie version). We didn’t do this because we’d transformed ourselves into sylphs, but because we crawled into the kitchen after work one evening and said we were sick of the diet. And too hungry for words.

But not so hungry that I’d eat KFC. I like my chicken free-range. Maybe I’m kidding myself with that bit of food morality, but you need to draw a line in the fried breadcrumbs somewhere.