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If they hadn’t invented Ikea, I really don’t know what I would do with my time.

For those of you who haven’t been lucky enough to enjoy the experience, it’s a combination of the maze at Hampton Court, Disneyland-style pedestrian management techniques (whereby one is sent on an endless series of switchbacks, giving the impression of moving forward while actually going nowhere at all) and Tardis, the time machine in Dr Who with the external dimensions of a telephone kiosk and the internal dimensions of a football stadium.

None of the Ikeas I’ve experienced are larger than 100m by 100m, but you never get out in under 3 hours, which at my pace is about 18kms of walking, all folded up inside. Clever stuff.

I used to be a dab hand of finding shortcuts (zip through behind a kitchen cabinet and you were in the kiddies section, having skipped carpets, glasses and bathrooms) but they’ve put the kibosh on that and I have to drift along with the rest of them, negotiating abandoned shopping trolleys parked across the traffic flow, abandoned children and adults who have abandoned their brains and are trying to swim against the current, negotiating the place from finish to start, swearing madly at everyone else and utterly convinced that they’re right and that everyone else has abandoned THEIR brains

But it was worth it, because we did come away with more paper serviettes than I could comfortably carry.

Plus a cyclamen.

And the ubiquitous tea lights.

What would life be without 2 gross of tea lights?

13 Nov This entry was published on 13 November, 2010 at 12:00. It’s filed under Commerce, Mainz and tagged ikea, NQM. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.