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.