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The Fourth Circle of Hell - Ikea

Wikipedia describes the 4th circle of hell thusly-
Those whose concern for material goods deviated from the desired mean are punished in this circle. They include the avaricious or miserly, who hoarded possessions, and the prodigal, who squandered them. Guarded by Plutus, each group pushes a great weight against the heavy weight of the other group. After the weights crash together the process starts over again.

Now who doesn't read that and think of Ikea?!

Ikea is a wonderful concept. Solid, simple products that are made cheap through Swedish efficiency in shop layouts, purchasing and self-assembly. Except when you think about it, the Swedish aren't exactly famous for their efficiency. The only Swedish things I can think of are meatballs, blonde women and the Muppet chef. With the possible exception of the meatballs none of these are particularly efficient and don't really provide much confidence in the Swedes' ability to design a pleasant shopping experience.

Moving into your new flat you find ugly carpets, no coffee table and that at some point in the move your tin opener has departed for greener pastures. Plus, as always, you need more bookcases and clip frames. And meatballs. You go on a weekday evening to avoid the weekend queues. That's a mistake - there are *always* crowds at Ikea. As soon as they start to dwindle the store staff take some more down off the shelves where they've been shrink-wrapped.

You arrive in the car park to discover the fuzzy definition of 'parking space' being adopted. There are cars on grass verges, zebra crossing and squeezed inside trolley enclosures. You walk past the eerily empty kiddies' play area still playing tinny music and with a sense of dread, arrive in the Showroom.

The biggest cause of trauma at Ikea is having a plan. If you know exactly what you want, it won't be there; if you know exactly which section you're aiming for, it will be blocked by idiots; if you selected the fjyrjn chairs from the internet, they'll turn out to be moulded to fit a 3-legged hippo. Plans just don't work at Ikea; they result in flapping, tears, ugly furniture and homicide.

My advice is to just follow the arrows. Drift with the crowd along the twisty route; collect the pencils, play with the paper tape measures and sit in an office chair and spin. Seriously, the way to achieve a stress free visit to Ikea is to just give in and spin.

You negotiate the showrooms and come out with a scribbled list of numbers and letters which when appear to spell out ‘d00m3d'. Avoiding the food hall in desperate hope that you'll get home in time for dinner, you enter The Market Place.

Now's your opportunity to drive the people you're shopping with truly bonkers as you agonise over whether to buy the 99p candle set. Eventually everyone adopts a ‘just throw it in' approach and you accrue 4 clip frames, a plant, 2 rugs, tealights, some kind of spice rack involving magnets, several large pieces of cardboard that through origami will become a desktidy/magazine holder/coffee maker and some more tealights.

Eventually your trolley is full and you move into the Warehouse. You stand in front of Aisle 23, section B staring in utter disbelief at the complete absence of Birch Billy Bookshelves. Your entire plan comes crashing down around your ears and you just stand there gaping, wondering what on earth you've done to deserve this cruel mockery. You're a good person - you pay your taxes, haven't killed any of the people that have pissed you off and have only sworn at people very quietly under your breath. Why have the sacred Billys forsaken you?

There follows some of the darkest moments of despair you're ever likely to experience - do you just go with beech which won't match the rest of the your shelving or do you resign yourself to a return visit. (Or just go with the beech and put it in a sunny spot, it'll match in no time).

You now find yourself with one trolley loaded down with long, heavy boxes of flatpack stuff and a second trolley loaded up with the rest of the tat, You round the final corner and are confronted with the point where the 'Swedish Efficiency Experts' gave up and went off for a meatball. All hell breaks lose as you are funnelled into a narrow passageway which then explodes into 132 individual checkout lines. You attempt to control trolleys that have the desperate desire to mate with each other and become completely and embarrassingly entangled.

After several days of queuing you get to the cash register you attempt to squash all your purchases onto a tablemat sized conveyor belt. Hopefully by this point you are beyond caring about how much money you've actually spent and are just glad to be approaching the finishing line. Alternately you're left slightly stunned by the War and Peace length receipt you are handed and how much you've spent on a lot of "it's only 99p" items.

And what reward are you issued at the end of this saga? An 89p hotdog. Well whoop-de-frigging-do.

At this point I could go on to cover the joys of attempting to wedge all the items into your car. However I can't actually talk about this without suffering nightmarish flashbacks to the Great Dining Table Debacle of 2006 when it turned out that only 95% of the table would fit in my car and we were forced to make extensive use of the free Ikea parcel twine to hold the boot closed. If anyone finds the silver striped tablemat which we lost out the back somewhere on the North Circular, please give it a good burial.

Then of course there's the issues of unpacking everything, inserting tab A into slot 43, staring in amazement at the innovative screw designs and discovering that the new rug sheds everywhere. The final straw comes when you realise there's only three legs for the coffee table and you're going to have to return to Ikea. but that's ok, because you forgot to buy any bloody meatballs anyway.