The post-dinner rant is all of a piece with our fetish for feedback, but isn’t it all a bit morally cheap?

My new duvet cover is upset with me. This is not, I stress, due to offensive activities in the bedroom. My sin is that two months after purchasing this admirably functional, mid-market item of bed linen, I have yet to leave a review on the company website.

Ever since my initial purchase – online, of course – I have been haunted by an increasingly plaintive sequence of requests, demands and, eventually, cajoling whimpers. Recently, these pleas moved firmly into the territory of emotional blackmail. As an “independent, family business”, my bed linen providers rely on positive reviews to keep a roof over their heads, I was told. I’m aware that the duvet cover itself isn’t sentient but, with this level of pressure leveraged in its name, it’s hard to catch sight of it in the laundry and not attribute to it a smidge of cotton-fibred resentment.