IKEA

I had cause to go to IKEA this weekend. In fact I have had cause to go there for a few weeks but have found one excuse or another to put it off. My home office chair had developed a tendency to occasionally “drop” for no apparent reason other than it must be over 10 years old and has really seen better days. I had been into Staples, who sell a wide variety of office chairs, and found every single one either uncomfortable, shoddy or outrageously expensive. One chair seemed to cover all three bases simultaneously. I had bought my current chair from Edinburgh IKEA and it has performed very well over the years, remaining comfortable and has been pretty durable, so I thought a journey back would be in order. Unfortunately, I find a trip to IKEA to be something of an ordeal.

I’ve nothing against the shop, as such, and have bought a variety of items from them over the years. However, it does take quite a while to get around as the shop is the size of Bavaria and has a car park the size of Austria. It is also a pain in the neck to get to. The roads are pretty direct but it involves travelling around the Edinburgh City Bypass which I look forward to with all the anticipation of root canal surgery. I did have great intentions of going in after work when the shop is quieter but the rush hour traffic is a nightmare so I chose, instead, to go on Saturday afternoon and take my daughter along for company. Unfortunately, that meant the shop was packed and we had to park on the far side of the car park (bordering Slovenia, I think).

IKEA has a path marked throughout that takes one past each and every department. This path is around the length of the West Highland Way and as a result there are “short-cuts” that promise to cut several days of walking time off the weary prospective shopper. Unfortunately these “short-cuts” appear far more likely to loop back on themselves forcing one to revisit the kitchen department or whatever it is that you are not looking for. I’m not quite sure how they manage to do this but I suspect some meddling with the fabric of time and space. In fact we wondered into one oversized wardrobe and found ourselves in Narnia. The end result is that the shop appears to be full of many lost and exasperated looking men (and it is men – dragged in under protest from their spouses having been bribed with the promise of meatballs). I’m sure there have been many people sucked into IKEA’s void for good: Glen Miller, Lord Lucan, several of the lost tribes of Israel.

We did eventually find our way to the office furniture section. My daughter tested all the chairs by sitting on them and spinning around. I am reliably informed that this is the best way to test office chairs. I slowly scooted around on one and pretended to be Davros which I am reliably informed is being a bit silly. Anyway, the range of chairs is far smaller than Staples but they seem to be a good deal more comfortable. I ended up going for their mid-range chair which is called Malkolm. (This amused Raymond somewhat when we got it home although he was a little disappointed that it wasn’t accompanied by a desk called Bernhard and a filing cabinet called Trevor). I filled out the stock number on a small slip of paper using a small pencil in the manner that one places small wagers on donkeys and made our way down to the warehouse – also about the size of Bavaria.

The warehouse also sells all those bits and pieces that women love and men lose the will to live over – curtains, cushions, light fittings called Björk and the like. Again “short-cuts” are advertised and this time I thought they were best avoided so that we were not whisked back to Nania. I did find our flat-pack package quite easily and paid for it before searching the vast car-park for a silver VW Golf - the number plate of which I constantly fail to remember. I was actually a bit suspicious of the package as it was surreally small. I knew the chair was going to be flat packed but this appeared to have been boxed up using some kind of Timelord technology allowing a fairly substantial office chair to be secreted into a box only marginally bigger than a fag packet.

It actually was the right box and the packaging is ingenious with most of the parts for the arms and legs being hidden within the chair back. The instructions were also quite easy to follow with a simple instruction written in every language from  the !Xu click tongue of Southern Africa through to the Klingon language of Comic-Con. It said “Follow Me” along with a series of cartoons of an amorphous blob holing an Allen key – the Scandinavian equivalent of a sonic screwdriver. And a very nice chair it is too. Hopefully this will last as long as the last one – after all I really don’t want to visit the Edinburgh City Bypass again any time soon.

A Year Of Bin Days

When I was putting the rubbish out this week I noticed that it is now a year since our bin collections (or at least the one for landfill) went to three weekly collections. Given that we were the pilot area for this it is possibly still too early to determine if this has made any great difference to the amount of waste recycled. I suspect that it hasn’t made that much difference and the main reason for changing was to save 50% of the cost of collections. I did, however, discover this snippet in the Council’s Spring newsletter (bottom left of page 4):

Falkirk Council was the first UK local authority to introduce the service that has led to a reduction of around 400 tonnes of material sent to landfill per month compared to same period prior to the change.

On average, the amount of waste discarded by households reduced by two kilogrammes per week and saw food waste tonnage recycled increase by as much as 75%.

If this result was replicated across the Falkirk Council area, around 9.000 tonnes of landfill material would be diverted to recycling representing a potential saving of £385K a year.

That’s actually quite impressive but it is hard to determine how much of the improvement is down to the 3 weekly collection cycle and how much is down to effective communication of what the recycling policy is. I suspect that the 75% increase in food waste collection is, in some part, down to better information which spells out that the collection is for kitchen waste (including things like cardboard from take-away pizza boxes) as much as the more emotive idea of wasting good edible food. In fact most of what goes into the waste caddy is not, and never was, edible.

It will be a while before the full effect of this policy becomes clear. The national figures for waste recycling have a lag of over a year with the current figures for 2013. Given that the new waste regime has yet to be fully rolled out it will be 2017 before we know how effective this is and I suspect that other changes may be in the pipeline – particularly as they are signed up to a zero waste strategy. I’m sure that there may still be people who will struggle with the 3 weekly waste collections: I would imagine that many foster carers would be struggling with potentially two or three young children producing more than their fair share of waste. However, the savings are not to be sniffed at – particularly as the alternative is almost literally throwing money away.

Jodrell Bank

Nerdy day trips part 14 – or what to do when everyone seems to be suffering from a snotty cold. We visited friends down in Manchester this week and had wanted to do something interesting with the kids. We were staying out near Saddleworth so I had hoped to do something a bit outdoors orientated and the weather, for once, obliged. Unfortunately, the gods of man-flu didn’t so we had to go for plan B – a trip to see the Jodrell Bank Observatory.

I was last at Jodrell Bank some 30 years ago and since that time quite a bit of the site has been rebuilt. This was partly due to the previous visitor centre having to be demolished due to asbestos issues. The new visitor centre is quite impressive although it no longer has the planetarium. They do have a lecture theatre which had a half hour talk on the recent solar eclipse and gave my daughter ample chance to show off her knowledge of the lunar landings (which they have recently covered at school.)

The centre piece of the observatory is still the massive Lovell radio-telescope which was in use whilst we were there. It’s actually far bigger than I remembered it and we were able to see it being repositioned whilst we were there. It is a truly remarkable feat of engineering to say nothing of the discoveries which it has managed to achieve in its near 60 years of operation.

Overall it was a very worthwhile trip and managed to make everyone forget about snotty noses for a while. Then again, it could be worse – I seem to recall Doctor Who having a less than successful day out there…

Boxed Sets

I’ve been browsing through my LoveFilm rental list over the last few days. I’m rather behind the times in that respect as I still prefer to rent DVDs (or more commonly BluRay discs) rather than stream content. Partly this is to do with the picture quality (many of the streamed services are in lower definition) but it is also because I rather like seeing the extras on the discs. For the most part I tend to rent feature films this way but I have started looking to see what boxed sets are available.

I don’t subscribe to pay TV services other than the Amazon streaming service that comes as part of LoveFilm so I tend to miss out on some of the major (usually American) series that are shown on the likes of Sky and Virgin. I’ve had a bit of a mixed reaction to this kind of box-set TV. Some series were highly rated but never really gelled with me: The Wire is a good example of a highly rated series that I just gave up on after a couple of disks as I felt it was going nowhere. Other series started off well but I gave up on after a few series – Lost was OK for a while but then seemed to turn into a repetitive soap opera and True Blood became both convoluted and samey after a while.

There have been some series that I took a decided dislike to for other reasons. I enjoyed Kiefer Sutherland’s 24 for a couple of series and even enjoyed one of the later ones but was aghast at the lack of moral comment in its portrayal of torture and I eventually gave up on it as I felt it was just consistent racist propaganda – still entertaining propaganda but morally repugnant in the same way that I find the Leni Riefenstahl movies of the mid-1930s.

There are a few series that I’m planning on trying out. One of the top ones is Game Of Thrones which sounds like the sort of thing I would like and seems to have rave reviews from all who have seen it. What puts me off slightly is the odd reviews that have criticised it for the amount of sex and violence (and violent sex) in the series. If it is integral to the plot I don’t really have a problem with this but I’ve seen far too many series where nudity and gore are thrown in to appeal to a certain demographic – mainly because the plot is too poor to hold the viewers’ attention. I suppose the one advantage of renting the DVDs is that it’s easy enough to click on “Cancel” if I want to give up on a boxed set.