The fun of IKEA
Like, I presume, many other people, I have a weird relationship with IKEA. I love how it correctly assumes people would get lost without arrows. I love that the owners have planned it to be a full day trip, so people will need to eat – and they can get a full meal for £2. I love the free pencils. Unfortunately it also has the ability to make my money fly from pockets, to be spent on (mostly) pointless items that won’t look nearly as good in my house as they do in the shop. Desk lamps, plants (real and fake), own-brand shower gel, a First Aid kit, two bath puffs and a print of some penguins. All from just one trip, when what we really wanted was a full-length mirror. Have you ever sat at home, peering into your underwear drawer and thinking ‘Y’know, I could really do with some cheap nylon sock dividers’? No? Me neither, but as soon as I open a slightly sticky drawer in IKEA and see them nestling, all colour-coordinated and lovely, they seem like the best idea in the world. Logic tells me that the little compartments won’t be big enough for my socks, or my drawers will turn out to be completely the wrong size… but this is part of IKEA’s cunning plan. Sock dividers, we think – marvellous. Then, when they don’t fit, we are forced to buy a new IKEA drawer unit so the sock dividers weren’t a waste of money. Ditto with IKEA sheets. They only fit IKEA beds. Intensely irritating. So your shiny new bedding either has to go in the bin or be forced onto the bed, ill-fitting and slightly awkward, looking a bit crap. Essentially, if you want to live in a house entirely fitted out with IKEA, fine, but fitting a lot of the stuff around your existing furniture can be a problem.
Just a thought – IKEA would be shite if it was British. Part of its joy is Scandinavian-controlled neatness and efficiency. Handing it over to the British would instantly make it grubby and horribly incompetent.
It’s not the STUFF in IKEA that’s fun – though a lot of it is very useful, reasonably priced and practical; it’s IKEA. There’s something phenomenonally entertaining about wandering off the delineated path to look at futons and emerging, confused, in ‘kitchens’. Is it possible to dissolve teeth in the pear cider? Will there be a comedy argument in the miserable traffic jam of slow-moving families? Oo. There’s the fun. If treated predominantly like an exhibition of shiny lighting and human nature, IKEA is wonderful. Just don’t try and fit their sock dividers in Argos drawers. It will only lead to disappointment.