IKEA

Twice a year I have to sacrifice an afternoon of my life to the God of Interior Design, IKEA.


It usually happens when my girlfriend is unhappy with one element of the house. It might be that we need a bookcase, a bin needs to change location or the curtains are too white. It doesn’t take much to open the gates into a land of complete house renovation. The table isn’t wooden enough, the backdoor doesn’t creek enough when it opens, the stairs are too steep.

It all builds up, the pressure increases until neither of us can take anymore and the situation explodes with a calm statement of ‘can we go to IKEA this Sunday?’

IKEA attracts 3 kinds of people:

- Couples who spend their time arguing about what to buy. It picks up briefly in the children’s section as one makes an effort to lighten the mood by picking up a soft toy, before it descends back into screaming fits in the market place over whether to buy the Jole or Jule cabinet.

- Students who look around the store for cheap furnishings that will stand their abodes out from every other student hovel in the country, but realise that the only things that they can afford are the same pieces of MDF self assembly junk that every other undergraduate has.

- Parents trying to measure up curtains whilst desperately trying to keep track of their children, who seem intent on hiding in each and every available nook and cranny within the store.

You could drop your kids off at the play area, but to do this involves filling out endless forms that remove IKEA from any liability should your child lose a body part or get lost in time in a wormhole. It also means leaving your beloved in a ball filled maze with the children of parents who will quite happily blindly fill in details for an hour or so as long as they can get rid of their little mites for a time.

I’ve not been to every IKEA store in the world, but I think I can take an educated guess that their layout doesn’t change too much. An endless queue of depressed grown ups who don’t earn enough to shop at John Lewis, follow arrows on the floor from section to section trying to find items that they hope will make their lives as happy as they were before they entered the store. What kind of a store needs arrows to help you through? Might as well put a conveyor belt in.

There are short cuts at various points, but these just leave their users disorientated, and often lost. One man I spoke to had been going from Kitchen to Storage and back for 3 days straight.

The store weaves around and back on itself like an intestine. Fold the whole thing out and you’d see to get from one end to another would be 7 miles. It could be used as a running venue. The Great IKEA run, raising money for those who have lost their children in wardrobes, somewhere in the bedroom department.

Should all this be something you wish to repeat at a regular interval you can join the IKEA family; it’s presumably some sort of cult where people use the polished bones of their victims to assemble their newly bought birch wood hat stand, purchased with a 10% discount.

That all said, they do have some pretty funny adverts.

Heron's Reach

Another new housing development has appeared in my fair village, this time going by the name of Heron’s Reach. I’ve no idea how large a heron’s reach is, or for that matter what it has to do with affordable housing for professional couples. I would have thought Heron’s wingspan would be more correct biologically speaking. However, I’ve recently wondered if the reach is, in fact, referring to the social reach of the lone bird. Perhaps the ‘lovingly designed cul-de-sac’ is actually a collection of safe houses and gambling dens for those lucky enough to be covered by the connections of the heron.

Either way we’re only one word away from Heron’s Reach Around, which adds a whole new slant on proceedings. The next street to be built is to be named, I believe, Badger’s Felch, which will be next to Mole’s Docking, with the end street to be called Toad of Toad Hall’s gay sex orgy.

So mafia influence or homosexual euphemism, both with the subject being a 3 foot wading bird; one of them is the reason for a street’s name. Take your pick, either way you’re paying £200K for a house on a street with a shit name.