My partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.
I know, right?
IKEA.
No doubt as that acronym-disguised-as-a-word starts to settle into your consciousness you’ll feel first a prickling of the hairs on the back of your neck, followed by a wave of dread whooshing down your spine, and finally the taste of your own frantic, frenzied heart leaping and thumping in your mouth. You might even let loose a brown torpedo of terror down the back of your trousers. Who could blame you?
Next, the lightning, the thunder, the very earth shaking beneath your feet, as the sun turns black, the sky turns white, birds fly backwards, mice become accountants, clouds come alive and start eating people, monkeys marry elephants, custard invades Norway, all sounds on earth become the sound of Rolf Harris crying, petrol stations declare war on delicatessens, old people start exploding, and Theresa May’s head turns into a sandcastle of jelly that’s swiftly leapt upon by a suddenly tiny Jeremy Corbyn, who bounces up and down on it whilst dressed as a lion and playing the hits of Bruno Mars on the kazoo – which of course all sound like Rolf crying.
IKEA. We don’t say I.K.E.A. We say IKEA. There’s very little precedent for this. We don’t say banqyoo. We don’t say himv, bihhs, tisbi or hisbic. But we say IKEA. Not I.K.E.A, and not Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. But IKEA. Why? I’ll tell you why. BECAUSE WE’RE SCARED.
IKEA!
Say its name five times into the mirror and a Swedish demon arrives, splits you into 600 different sections and hides the Allen key. IKEA doesn’t sell furniture: it sells brimstone-studded time-bombs. It sells cursed artefacts. It sells evil.
The whole process from getting your new furniture home to having a massive mental breakdown to eventually filing for divorce is so vein-poppingly predictable that you could turn it into a gameshow. “OK, so Jamie’s opened the box and started unpacking his new wardrobe; he’s dropped a few heavy slats onto his fingers, some mild swearing there, but otherwise he’s doing okay. They’re off to a good start. He’s only growled malevolently at his partner, Chelsea, once, and she’s only imitated his speech but in the process changed his voice so he sounds disabled twice, so that’s all very encouraging. Jamie hasn’t started accusing the instruction manual of being part of a global Jewish conspiracy yet, and Chelsea hasn’t suggested that his incompetence at DIY might be connected with his small penis, so there’s still all to play for. OK, round one. How long before Chelsea chides him for being just like his mother, leading to Jamie smashing the wardrobe into pieces with the heel of his shoe while screaming racist abuse about the Swedes? Shall we start the bid at 15 seconds?”
The horror; the horror.
IKEA: those hallowed halls in which relationships come to die; that vast maze of uncertainty that herds its terrified consumers through endless iterations of eerie facsimiles of happy homes until their sanity starts scraping at the edge of their perceptions with sharpened claws, and causes their souls to bleed out through their eyes.
Nothing there is ever as it seems. It’s the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, but every last bit of it is room 237. It’s the labyrinth from Hellraiser 2, but with scented candles. It’s the labyrinth from Labyrinth, but with more goblins. You’ll find yourself falling to your knees and screaming things like: ‘A TOTTVIRSK SKAR-KOLSHEN FRIGIN?! WHY DON’T THEY JUST CALL IT A FUCKING PILLOW?’ and ‘WHY ARE THERE OVER 8000 EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT LOOKING BED FRAMES THAT SHARE THEIR NAMES WITH THE CHARACTERS FROM THE TV SHOW VIKINGS?’
You’ll find yourself pushing against a mewling herd of zombies as they coo and stare and drool and moan at configurations of furniture so bizarre it’s like their piles and patterns have been precisely arranged and interlocked to open a portal to Hell itself. If pain and despair suddenly became currency, you’d be a multi-millionaire. The worst is yet to come. You’ll catch sight of yourself in one of the many mirrors placed strategically around the store, and you’ll see yourself looking longingly at a set of brackets on a pine bunk-bed – an enraptured look in your eyes that should only really be directed at other humans, and only then during foreplay – and you’ll realise, with horror and helplessness, that you too are a zombie, no better than the wretches shuffling by your side, perhaps even worse, because you’re the one that’s nursing a boner over a hinge bracket.
And a little part of you will die, right there in that store, a little part of you that’s lost forever in the anti-septic graveyard of Scandinavian lifestyle consumerism. And you’ll cry. You’ll cry for your mummy and your daddy, for God and Jesus and Santa and Satan, and angels and demons, and lawyers and doctors, and even aliens from the planet Quanabongo Fattafafaloop. But it’ll do no good. A series of tiny little words will fall softly from your mouth, gliding to the ground as if carried there on the wind by parachutes. “I…want…to….go….
Home.”
But you can’t go home.
You can’t go home ever again…
Never.
Ever.
Never ever.
Yes, my partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.
And do you know what?
We loved it! It was fucking great! Seriously. I’m not messing with you here. It’s one of the best few hours we’ve spent together in recent memory.
How is that even possible? I’ll tell you how: because we didn’t bring the boys.
That’s what we realised in IKEA that morning – that blissful, peaceful, wonderful morning – that IKEA itself wasn’t the culprit; that there was nothing intrinsically evil about IKEA. OK, the furniture itself is still demonic, and expertly designed to throw the hearts of men into anguish and chaos, I won’t be swayed on that, but the place itself – the building, the people, the displays – all of that is absolutely, one-hundred per cent fine.
To paraphrase Doc from Back to the Future: ‘It’s your kids, Marty. Something’s got to be done about your kids.’
Our trip was like a million great dates rolled into one. We strolled hand in hand, turning to smile at each other every ten seconds or so like we couldn’t quite believe what was happening. No little hands were reaching up to bat our fingers apart; we weren’t running through fake kitchens shouting ‘COME BACK! THE BAD MAN IS AT HIS MOST PROLIFIC IN SWEDISH KITCHENS!’ and ‘WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT SMASHING YOUR BROTHER IN THE FACE WITH AN OUMBÄRLIG FRYING PAN?!’; we weren’t standing prostrate with frustration and helplessness, our faces growing redder and deader by the second as the kids devised a million ways to test our patience and diminishing sense of human decency; we weren’t apologising to a succession of half-crippled old ladies rendered ever-so-slightly more crippled by our children ramming tiny trolleys into their ancient limbs.
We were free.
We cracked jokes, we talked, we laughed, we lay next to each other on a hundred beds in a hundred different softly-lit little stage-rooms. We even disappeared up the back of an aisle in the warehouse section to do something a bit naughty, so overtaken were we with the freedom of the moment. We ate those disgusting hot-dogs that everyone convinces themselves are the best thing they’ve ever eaten because they’re really cheap, and we ate them in happy, contented silence, still looking up to smile at each other every ten seconds or so, this time through globs of onions and dead pig (and turkey, and horse, probably); her wearing a ketchup moustache, and my beard so enriched with ketchup and mustard it looked like an English soldier from 1745.
At one point I started missing the kids terribly. I thought, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. They would’ve been giggling and laughing and playing make-believe in the little pretend houses, and asking things like, ‘What language do the polar bears speak in Sweden, daddy?’ and ‘Do there really have to be this many fucking different types of coffee table?’ Maybe it would’ve been great.
Then we spied a mother standing in the kids’ section, rooted to the spot on IKEA’s Hell-o Brick Road with a look of horror, fear, defeat and anguish scrawled across her features. Her kids were rampaging through the section like solid poltergeists, rattling toys, hurling teddy bears and bursting in and out of tents, an orchestra of high-pitched screams accompanying their chaos. Chelsea and I squeezed each other’s hands together all the tighter, and walked up to this poor, tragic woman, smiling beatifically at her like we were monks.
“We understand what you’re going through,” we said.
She smiled weakly at us.
“We left the kids with their aunty.”
I feel we were rubbing it in, ever so slightly. But do you know what? It felt good. We were winners. For once, we were the winners. That woman was like the Jesus of IKEA, suffering so that we didn’t have to. Reminding us that although we loved the ever-loving shit out of our kids, and couldn’t face the thought of an existence without them, we shouldn’t feel guilty about enjoying three blissful hours away from their weaponised enthusiasm.
We skipped, we smiled, we laughed.
Thank you, IKEA.
It was heavenly.