this weekend marked the occassion of a big milestone in my life – my first trip to ikea.

i now possess in-depth understanding of their marketing and sales techniques. it works basically like this:

you go in there with the notion of purchasing a few essential, cheap, yet stylish home goods. perhaps you even have a list. most certainly, everyone who goes in has a budget.

upon entering, you find yourself captivated by all the pretty colours and showroom design ideas. as you wend your way through the maze, you find yourself putting more and more items in the provided bright yellow carrier bag, simply because they are kinda cool looking, cheap, and you could probably use a new *whatever*. and you think it’s ingenious that you can buy things in modules or separate pieces and start trying to calculate the price of the model entertainment centre, without the cabinet and with wood doors instead of glass.

you begin to get disoriented, and find yourself wandering in circles. after a while you realise that it’s been 4 hours since you last saw natural lighting, or breathed air which had not been recirculated. and you find yourself in a mammoth warehouse trying to match little numbers to what you scrawled down on your reference list, and pushing giant trolleys in a dazed manner, and the panic begins to set in as you start to think “how the fuck do you get out?!?!?!” and by the time you reach the holy grail of the cash tills, and queue, and put all your stuff on the conveyor belt and you start seeing things like a set of 10 rubber spatulas and track lighting for inside the cupboards, and you start to wonder “*what* am I buying??” before you realise it is far too late, if you want to have any hope of getting out alive, you have to just hand over your wallet and make a frenzied dash for the daylight right past the exit sign…

and in the dazzling light, you blink madly while your pupils adjust and realise that you are now out £200 and one whole weekend afternoon of your life, neither of which you will ever get back…

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