Köttbullar

I have been witnessed saying that I will never go back to Ikea - in fact all of the Ikea furniture that had survived since our 'young couple' days was either burnt or given away when the old house was demolished.
But humble pie tastes good and italian designer kitchens are for boom times. When the budget's stretched and you have the intention to DIY, Ikea does present the ideal solution of a system that takes everything into consideration at a reasonable price (no I'm not sponsored...yet).

So off we went, bravely.

It's not up there with moving house, or getting married/divorced or renewing your expired carte de séjour or any of those other traumatic life experiences, but it's not far off. A Sunday buying your flat packed kitchen from Ikea is up there in the top 20.
When we arrived, smugly clutching our Ikea Home Planner printout, with 20 minutes to spare before opening time, we were quickly taken down a notch by the sight of a good two dozen brave souls already installed in an orderly queue before the entrance. These people must be the experts. They had that hardened look of those that have seen frontline action before. They had what it takes. They hadn't gone for that extra 5 minutes in bed after the alarm went off, or that second cup of coffee. When the doors finally opened our worst fears were confirmed. We followed blindly behind, realising that we were in fact like new born lambs to the whole thing. These people before us, bunched up in a fast moving scrum and rapidly disappearing behind a distant line of Billies, had already discovered the Swedish furniture shop equivalent of the Northwest Passage. Borrowing routes previously only known to the yellow and blue clad indigens they led us on a trail behind 'babychange facility', across '25m² studio for cash strapped student', through 'finance waiting' directly to Faktum Land and a numbered ticket. All this without the use of any visible hand held navigation system. (GPS doesn't get a signal in Ikea).
From the front door stampede at 10am to the obligatory post trauma cup of tea it was 7 hours of hell without the help of a phrase book or even a break for a reindeer burger.
The overall experience was akin to having been the unwitting victim of a Walace and Gromit style assembly line without the advantage of a conveyor belt.
Eventually we were spat out onto a 1 in 8 loading bay ramp with 250Kilos of flat pack on a runaway trolley in search of our hire van.

The Client drove, and I was Mr Shifter.

Don't forget to tighten the screws.

ticking over

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Remember it'll soon be Xmas.