Fidel Gastro’s

And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I hate Ikea. I really do.

I do feel bad having another rant without a compenstating rave or rhyme and that the object of the rant is the ‘spotty kid with one arm in the playground‘-type easy target but vent I must.
I won’t even start on the actual stores where my sole purpose is to race though as fast as I can, grab a handful of 10p forks and get to the hotdogs at the end - all the time being drawn by the sweet smell of boiled pork products, nor the banal Swedish proto-minimalist wankdom that the brand represents but today I will playahate the actual products our hot Scandi friends produce. The furni.
Last weekend when moving home I had to assemble two pieces of furniture - a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. I was faced with 40 million dowels, a ‘cute’ lego-esque instruction manual, the final structural stability of the Tacoma Narrows bridge and elegantly appropriate nomenclature. It’s quite apt that their PC desk is called the Jerker.

“Fuck I thought that bracing rod was ornamental. Martha why did we have to get this bridge at Ikea? They had a great one at Habitat”

Self-assembly. Is this some piece of advanced social engineering to ensure the male in the household with no skills apart from advanced Excel and Powerpoint can demonstrate himself as the craftsman of the village? This is not making furniture, this is not honing a piece of mahogany on a lathe with fine master trademans skills. This is assembly and should be being performed in a ‘hidden-from-Google-Earth’ Chinese labour camp, made by dissident local bloggers and made out of chipboard, human hair and choi sum. And dissidents.

I don’t want to do it myself. It feels like Sim-SweatShop and it’s definitely not fun like Lego. I’m not constructing by hand a 1/10th scale Ferrari Enzo with full functioning gear box - I’m labouring over a 1/2 scale sideboard with non-functioning handles. I have to build my own ‘furniture’, scan my own shopping (which is fun the few times in a Fisher Price ‘my first checkout’ kinda way) and roll my own summer rolls in Hanoi Cafe on Kingsland Road. The latter was such an aberration of cookery it looked like a skin graft procedure gone horrible wrong.

Made by trained chefs, not by Cian.

However as you dive further down the furniture chain of hope you get to bowels known as Argos where the assembly concept reaches new depths. At this level you aren’t assembling and cursing losing the last locknut, in fact you’re just putting all the bits in a box and shaking it. Open the box and out pops a cupboard made of canvas, balsa wood and velcro. That’s right - the wretched, twisted offspring of a Victorian kite and a shellsuit - propped up against the wall, swaying like a new-born foal. You look at this GCSE CDT reject and for the one and only time in your life - you wish you’d gone to Ikea instead.