Wasted youth (in IKEA)

Dear readers,

One of the most agreeably mad news stories of the year (and, Lord, what a year 2016 has been for mad news stories) appeared on the BBC website today. The management of Scando furniture peddlers IKEA has appealed to teenagers across Europe to stop sneaking into its stores and having what are described as “non-sponsored” sleepovers (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38390497). Apparently, the “craze” – if “craze” it is; the word can often mean a few people having done it and posted something vacuous on YouTube – was started by a pair of Belgians in August, and has since spread. It started me thinking.

Now, I hold no brief against IKEA. I remember when its only UK outlet was in Warrington, and what a revelation to the British shopping public it was. Here was cleanly-designed, stylish, affordable Swedish furniture which came in flat-pack form. It was Habitat for the masses, with not a Conran in sight. It was no surprise that the brand caught on and grew like topsy. It appealed particularly to one demographic, in my experience: rental landlords. I recall flat-hunting in Edinburgh ten years ago and more, and everywhere we went, every flat we saw, there was the same furniture. Smart, reasonably durable, easily replaceable. IKEA had struck. At the back of your mind – if you’re anything like me – was the safety net of “If we break something, we can replace it and no-one will ever know”. Added to this was the whimsically amusing names of its products: Billy the Bookcase, Kassett the Media Storage, Noggin the Nog.

We are all Scandinavians now, of course. If you don’t have a pullover like Sarah Lund, if you can’t hold forth on the nuances between the British and the Swedish versions of Wallander, and if you don’t embrace hygge, then get the hell out of Dodge. I haven’t fully succumbed to the Scando-noir phenomenon, though I do have the first series of The Killing on DVD somewhere. Friends tell me all of these dark, gloomy, bitter police procedurals, and associated acts like Borgen, are excellent, and I’m willing to believe them. But there is only so much time in the day. We also hear how Scandinavian children start school much later than tots in the UK, and end up much better educated and performing more strongly in exams by the time they are 18. And of course Nordic society is revered, especially on the left, for its cohesion, its generous welfare and its general cosiness.

It is not for me to be the fly in the ointment. We can gloss over the high levels of alcoholism and suicide, and the cracks appearing as immigration becomes a talking point. There are also questions to be asked about whether the performance of flaxen-haired young Viking moppets at school is solely down to the age at which they start, and whether we could replicate it over here. These are weighty matters for people other than me.

I want to return to IKEA. It certainly fills a profitable niche. It is, after all, the world’s largest furniture retailer. Clearly, it is doing something right. (We will draw a veil over its rather complex corporate governance arrangements, with registration in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. This is definitely not to reduce its tax burden. No sirree.) There is certainly no sin in supplying affordable, handsome, easy-to-construct furniture to a wide audience.

There is, however, one major stumbling block. That’s getting the damned stuff. Things may have changed now, but the last time I tried to have furniture delivered from IKEA, it was an absolute mission; the delivery charge was high, arranging the delivery was complicated and we had more than one false start. Clearly, IKEA wants you to go to one of its sprawling, cavernous stores. And that’s where it all starts to fall apart.

I have sampled several IKEA stores over the years: Warrington, Edinburgh, Wembley Croydon (the last was particularly traumatic: long story). They are – and I’m sure this is deliberate – pretty much interchangeable. You are led round a pre-ordained path of mock bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, studies, wherein are displayed all the wares IKEA has to offer you. Come on, they seem to say. Wouldn’t this look great in your house? OK, you don’t think you need a new TV stand, but you do really. It’ll make you happier. So far, so good. Any self-respecting retailer will try to sell you stuff you don’t need.

But there’s something about IKEA stores. Maybe it’s the lack of natural light. Maybe it’s the sense of being on a conveyer belt – you feel guilty if you break away from the approved route or somehow shortcut it by looking at Frida the Dining Table and missing out a whole section of her friends. Of course, it is an especial hell at weekends. Families seem to regard it as a kind of recreational activity, to push their increasingly heavily-laden trollies around, scribbling numbers and names on a piece of paper to collect their items in the warehouse section at the end. IKEA, dear readers, is where relationships go to die. When you go in, you might imagine you are the greatest love match since Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. An hour later – an hour if you’re lucky – the husband is a sullen, unreceptive boor, and the wife is a shrill, nagging harpy. The children will be largely feral by now. Every ounce of affection will have been sucked out of the union, and she will have realised that, actually, the way he pronounces “IKEA” is really, really annoying, while he will be reflecting that her habit of putting one hand on the handle of the trolley while he’s pushing makes him want to slap it away. One of us is doing the pushing, right? You or me. I don’t care which. But not both.

Eventually, of course, the ordeal will end. The money will be paid, the purchases piled up again, and the dread of assembling it all will settle in. First, though, Swedish meatballs! Yes, after at least 60 minutes of hell and existential self-loathing, what you want is a plate of meatballs, or a hot dog. The children certainly will. (If children today are anything like I was many years ago, they will regard it as a cardinal sin to pass a food outlet without buying something. It may only be 11.30 am, but a Fancy Dog – that’s what they call them, I’m not making this up – is just the ticket for a seven-year-old boy.)

That is your IKEA experience. We will gloss over the later assembly experience. By some standards, it could be much worse. The instructions are generally OK, though sometimes you wonder if there is a step missing in the pictograms. You may also be left with some additional screws, which will cause you to wonder if you’ve done something wrong. (They are not completely impossible to misunderstand: the former Mrs Sybarite once stood back proudly from a bookshelf to discover she had nailed the backing panel of plywood over the front of the shelves. We eventually resolved it.)

So I return to these teenagers who are secreting themselves in IKEA stores across Europe for their “non-sponsored” sleepovers. Why on Earth would you do that? You’re teenagers, for God’s sake. You’re supposed to be playing on your Xbox or drinking cheap cider in a park. You have no business in IKEA. That will come later. For now, save yourselves. All right, the “craze” was started by Belgians, who might not have had much else to do. But it’s no way to spend your teenage years. If, in ten years’ time, one of your anecdotes begins “Remember that time we hid in IKEA…”, then truly you have wasted your life.